Liaison Magazine - LLAS Centre for Languages, Linguistics and ...

eview
Japan’s Built-in Lexicon of
English-based Loanwords
Review by Tessa Carroll
In his new book, Frank Daulton makes
the case that the vast numbers of
English-based loanwords in Japanese
constitute a largely ignored and
untapped resource for Japanese learners
of English.This is an attractive argument,
since the difficulties for Japanese
speakers learning English – and vice
versa – stem largely from the fact that
the two languages are completely
unrelated in grammar and lexicon.
However, the flood of English words that
has entered Japanese since the late
nineteenth century, and particularly since
World War II, is potentially helpful to the
learner, just as recognising that door is
related to Tür helps Germans learning
English. But, whereas the role of
cognates in language learning between
European languages is widely recognised,
in Japan, there has been resistance to
exploit English-based loanwords in this
way, for reasons discussed and, to a great
extent, refuted by Daulton.
The book is divided into four parts:
Japan’s importation of English; gairaigo
(loanwords, literally “words coming from
abroad”) and language acquisition; the
built-in lexicons; and exploiting Japanese
loanword cognates. An epilogue offers
more prospects and suggestions for the
application of the author’s findings in
teaching. Around 40 pages of appendices
demonstrate the overlap between
loanwords in Japanese and the most
commonly used English words taken
from the British National Corpus and
academic words (Coxhead 1998).
Although the book is aimed mainly at
English as a Foreign Language (EFL)
teachers and Second Language
Acquisition (SLA) researchers, the first
part will also be of interest to teachers
and learners of Japanese. Chapter 1
provides a succinct introduction to the
Japanese language and writing system,
and to EFL and the English language in
Japan, followed by an excellent historical
and linguistic overview of the
complexities of how English words have
been adopted and adapted by Japanese
speakers. Daulton has spent nearly
twenty years teaching English in Japan,
and his description is depressingly
familiar to my own experience of
teaching in Japanese state schools in the
early 1980s, since when little seems to
have changed:“Japanese EFL is
characterized by not only its
dependence on grammar-translation and
focusonentranceexams,butbylarge
classes of taciturn students.” (p.2)
The bulk of the book examines the
role of cognates in language learning,
focusing particularly on the author’s
long-term research into Japanese
students’ understanding and use of
loanword cognates. Supporting the
argument that errors play an important
developmental role in learners’
interlanguage, Daulton makes the
important point that “[t]he advantage of
errors over avoidance is especially stark
in the context of Japanese EFL learners”,
who tend to be passive and reticent to
communicate. He goes on to examine in
detail common loanword cognates for
high-frequency and academic English
vocabulary, and quantifies the extent to
which they overlap semantically and
formally. Daulton notes his astonishment,
shared by this reviewer, at the number of
high-frequency cognates:“around half of
high-frequency [English] word families
Frank E. Daulton
(2008)
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters
ISBN: 978-1-84769-030-2
Liaison magazine • llas.ac.uk •41