I've done a year of listening drills using Core 6000 imported into Anki, and worked my way through RTK1 using this site. I've also done a fair amount of reading on different strategies and learning techniques. I've realized there is an important resource missing from my toolset, and I expect that it exists but haven't had any luck finding it.

What I seek is a list of common morphemes in spoken Japanese - spoken word fragments that are reused with the same meaning in (at least) several words. This would be a mapping from the pronunciation of a word fragment to a list of common possible meanings for that sound. For example, it would tell me that KOU could mean high, or public, or (many other things in this case).

Ideal format would be along the lines of:

Code:

MORPHEME    MEANINGS    EXAMPLES
_______________________________
こう        high/vast     高速 こうそく high speed; 洪水 こうずい flood
          public        公金 こうきん public funds

Note that I've included the (perhaps etymologically wrong) example of treating 高速 and 洪水 as the same meaning of spoken morpheme こう to illustrate a point: because kanji were imported and grafted onto the spoken Japanese language, there is not a one-to-one relationship between spoken word fragments and kanji, which is why such a system would be naturally based on phonetics->meaning rather than the chaotic concept of kanji "readings".

I feel this resource would be very useful, because this body of knowledge is necessary to guess the possible meanings of unknown words. It is knowledge which will slowly accumulate as you build up a large vocabulary, but why not list it out explicitly? It could be used as mnemonic guide to aid in the learning of new words... after building up a vocab of several thousand words, many of which I only know from my anki study set, I started suffering crippling interference because every word I learn is one vowel away from several other words I've learned and it can be hard to keep them straight. Paying attention to the kanji helps a bit, but because of the lack of a one-to-one relationship it is less than ideal. Having a reference such as this would help one learn to hear spoken word fragments as concepts strung together to make words - as we do with our native languages.

When considering Japanese: sounds have semantic meanings; these are combined into spoken words; these words may be written using various kanji as shorthand. A morpheme dictionary fits naturally to the realities of the language, and while I don't think I would bulk memorize it, doing so would likely be a much better use of time than memorizing kanji "readings".

So, does such a resource exist? Would people be interested in collaborating on something like this? Is it a bad idea for some reason I can't see?

geoff Wrote:

Code:

MORPHEME    MEANINGS    EXAMPLES
_______________________________
こう        high/vast     高速 こうそく high speed; 洪水 こうずい flood
          public        公金 こうきん public funds

Note that I've included the (perhaps etymologically wrong) example of treating 高速 and 洪水 as the same meaning of spoken morpheme こう to illustrate a point: because kanji were imported and grafted onto the spoken Japanese language, there is not a one-to-one relationship between spoken word fragments and kanji, which is why such a system would be naturally based on phonetics->meaning rather than the chaotic concept of kanji "readings".

こう, however, is a sino-Japanese morpheme in these cases, meaning that it was borrowed along with the words and kanji. The Japanese こう represents several distinct spoken Chinese sounds that were collapsed into one in Japanese. I'm not all that knowledgeable about historical Chinese so it's possible that the morphemes represented by 高 and 洪 were originally the same morpheme (despite being pronounced differently in modern Mandarin).

Quote:So, does such a resource exist? Would people be interested in collaborating on something like this? Is it a bad idea for some reason I can't see?

It doesn't really sound that useful to me. It's true that there's not a one-to-one relationship between a kanji and a meaning, but there's not a one-to-one relationship between a spoken morpheme and a meaning either. I'm just having trouble understanding the advantage of this.

Thanks for the feedback. I don't know whether people with a more advanced command of the language will agree that such a resource is truly useful; but as someone trying to claw my way up from nothing, anything that gives structure the language certainly seems appealing.

The imagined benefit is that such a resource would provide a way for students to more easily see some of the patterns in the language; so that words could be learned with an awareness of the patterns into which they fit, rather than learning a bunch of words and someday realizing "oh, this word that just came up in my flashcards has something in common with some other word I recently reviewed; what word was that again? (ponder; dig through flash cards) oh yeah, this one. they both have the same first sound, and they both have to do with bigness in some way".

I think the problem is that the great majority of the time, if two sino-Japanese morphemes have the same pronunciation but different kanji, they are unrelated to each other. Examples like the 高/洪 one are the exception rather than the rule. It's not that I don't think there's *any* use in this, I'm just not sure it gives you big advantages over just seeing which words use the same kanji.

geoff Wrote:so that words could be learned with an awareness of the patterns into which they fit, rather than learning a bunch of words and someday realizing "oh, this word that just came up in my flashcards has something in common with some other word I recently reviewed; what word was that again? (ponder; dig through flash cards) oh yeah, this one. they both have the same first sound, and they both have to do with bigness in some way".

I actually feel that there is benefit in having those flashes of realization for yourself -- I find I remember the links better for having had that "aha!" moment about them. I also suspect that the mental link that gets created is stronger because it will be between something you already knew reasonably well (well enough to spontaneously remember it, anyway) and a new item, rather than between two new items.

[Katsuo]

I'm not sure about the language in general, but there's some information how certain sounds and meanings are related in onomatopoeia in the introduction to "Jazz up your Japanese". The entire introduction is available in the free sample.

Thanks Katsuo, that is interesting and useful in its own right.