Paper short abstract:

This paper will show that learners understand Japanese grammar better in reflection of their own language or foreign languages they have learned before.

Paper long abstract:

The Council of Europe promotes lifelong language learning due to the linguistic and cultural diversity all over Europe. This is similarly important for teachers of Japanese as a foreign language facing various students of different mother tongues. Obviously, these teachers would understand their students' mistakes and difficulties better relying on a vast knowledge about languages of the world.

Descriptions of Japanese grammar as a foreign language have developed further in the last decades resulting in a considerable number of handbooks and sentence pattern dictionaries. However, these books are conceived and written by native researchers of Japanese, thus, comparative approaches are hardly found. Many learners feel limited in their understanding when confronted with a language of different nature.

This paper intends to provide a new perspective for teaching grammar based on own teaching experience in Europe and observations in teacher training institutions. Many learners have troubles in understanding particular grammar and using natural expressions. This paper will show paradoxically that learners understand Japanese grammar better in reflection of their own language or foreign languages they have learned before.

In practice, the following cases were successful: For differentiation of the locative particles ni and de, the idea of verbal valency of European languages, which is difficult for native Japanese to understand, was introduced. The second example refers to the awareness of their own systematic use of intonation and word order to express a certain information structure in languages which have no morphological differentiation such as wa and ga. These outcomes stem from the following fact: before, the learners only noticed how their own language works, now they understand the functional equivalence, a unique phenomenon in Japanese can now be grasped as naturally as they do this within their mother tongues.

Systematizing these findings to compile teaching units will shed new light on teaching grammar of Japanese as a foreign language.