[HELP] Project on Comparative Analysis between English and Japanese

[fatma0828]

Hi, I'm doing a project on Linguistics comparing morphology for English and Japanese

But I'm less competent with Japanese than I thought I was and am needing some help from knowledgeable members here.

1. Are there authoritative sources evaluating how difficult Japanese is for English speakers?
This is the closest I could find: Which is the easiest language to learn? - a knol by Dominic Ambrose
but I can't locate the said source from US Department. :-(

2. How do I prove that most kanji are actually borrowings from Chinese?

3. Is there any infixation in Japanese at all?

Thanks in advance!

 

[nice gaijin]

I would recommend looking up and e-mailing professors of linguistics and phonology to see if they can answer your questions or point you in the right direction. I studied with Professor Mari Kondo at Waseda, and she was very knowledgeable about both English and Japanese morphology, and spoke English quite fluently.

I'm sure there are exceptions, but I can't think of examples of infixation in Japanese; most conjugation is done through suffixes.

 

[fatma0828]

thank you very much

is there any way I can prove that infixation is lacking in Japanese though?

 

[nice gaijin]

empirical observation? Perhaps this subject has already been tackled before, you can check to see if any research has already been done, although you may find it hard to find an English copy..

 

[nekojita]

Surely your teacher/lecturer does not expect you to re-invent the wheel, but to first see whether there is an established opinion about this.
e.g. you should first look for things like:
1. a textbook on Japanese linguistics.
2. scientific papers on Japanese linguistics or comparative linguistics.
You can then cite where you get facts from. It is always better to cite something like a book or paper than a webpage (as a webpage can change).

A quick search on books.google.com shows
An introduction to Japanese linguistics by Natsuko Tsujimura (preview only)

Infixes are bound morphemes that are inserted in the middle of a word rather than being placed before or after it. Japanese does not have any example of infixes.

A minute on Google Scholar
turned up a paper called
Linguistic Distance: A Quantitative Measure of the Distance Between English and Other Languages
which is about comparing measures of similarity between languages to difficulty in learning, as measured both by the ability of American English speakers to learn a given language as L2, and the ability of immigrants to Canada to learn English (or French) depending on their native language.

There are surely many other sources. Your institution (I am assuming you are university level) will probably have access to many journals, so you should be able to find a few you have access to.