All About Japanese Verbs

  Takahashi, Hideya. “On the Acquisition of Potential Verbs and Conjugation Types of Verbs in Japanese.” Open Linguistics, vol. 7, no. 1, De Gruyter, 2021, pp. 17–34, https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2021-0002. 

In “On the Acquisition of Potential Verbs and Conjugation Types of Verbs in Japanese.”, author Takashi Hideya writes about the natural pattern of potential tense verb conjugation in native child speakers of Japanese, and strives to disprove the research of another author Hashimoto Fuji, who claims that verb acquisition is more limited than Takashi believes it to be. Takashi finds that children around the age of 2 years are able to develop the ability to form simple potential case verbs because they have formed the same rules of lexicon that adults have, and therefore after the period of 2 years and 6 months, can move onto what are called verb stem-rare-ru verbs, a more complex version of the simple verb stem-e-xu verb conjugation. To conclude, Takashi feels that Fuji’s research is too limited and discredits the ability of children, using long-term observations to support his claim that Japanese children can acquire an understandable potential-verb lexicon early on. 

  TATSUMI, TOMOKO, and JULIAN M. PINE. “Comparing Generativist and Constructivist Accounts of the Use of the Past Tense Form in Early Child Japanese.” Journal of Child Language, vol. 43, no. 6, Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 1365–84, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000915000732.

Authors Tomoko Tatsumi and Julian M. Pine, in their article “Comparing Generativist and Constructivist Accounts of the Use of the Past Tense Form in Early Child Japanese.”, explore the method of acquisition of past tense verbs in Japanese children. Tatsumi and Pine discover that by listening to Japanese children from ages 2-10 speak, the highest frequency of verbs that showed up when analyzing their speaking patterns are past tense verbs, because they hear these the most often. In accordance with that, both authors believe this can reasonably show that the past tense form is a “special default-like” conjugation for Japanese children. All in all, Tatsumi and Pine conclude that frequency input is the preferred method for Japanese verb acquisition because of the link between the frequency input and subsequent use of past-tense verbs. 

  Raden Novitasari, and Uning Kuraesin. “Error Analysis Of The Use Japanese Verb Meaningful ‘Wear’ In Japanese Student Of Japanese Language Department Widyatama University.” Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education, vol. 12, no. 8, Karadeniz Technical University Distance Education Research and Application Center, 2021, pp. 719–25.

In “Error Analysis Of The Use Japanese Verb Meaningful ‘Wear’ In Japanese Student Of Japanese Language Department Widyatama University.”, authors Novitasari and Kuraesin map the error analysis of Japanese verb use in college aged second language speakers. They use four common language learning errors: overgeneralization, ignore of rule restrictions, incomplete application of rules, and false concepts to further understand the verb errors most frequently made in JSL speakers over 2 semesters labeled Semester 4 and Semester 6. In semester 4, the most misused verbs were hameru (50%), shimeru (50%), and haku (37%). In semester 6 these remain the same, but with shimeru (71%) leading, and hameru and maku both garnering 58%. In conclusion, students tend to misuse these types of verbs leading to an overwhelming frequency error in Japanese “wearing” verbs, as the article title suggests.