Supporting Japanese Language Learners with an Onomatopoeia Learning Site

Abstract

This paper describes our study where we aim to support onomatopoeia learning for Japanese language learners using our developed website called SLL Ono (To See, to Listen, to Learn onomatopoeia). The lack of English proficiency of Japanese people has been pointed out for a long time. Therefore it is a must for foreigners to have a Japanese language skill to survive in Japan. The focus in our study is onomatopoeia learning since there are more than 4,500 onomatopoeia words in Japanese. The result of our pilot evaluation shows that there was no statistically significant difference between our system and the blogger site. However the mean score increased more when they learned with SLL Ono and 15 out of 16 participants preferred our system. It was found that our automatically generated quiz function did not work effectively enough and that the refinement of the learning contents was necessary. It is among our future works to improve our quiz system and add more contents in order to improve quiz efficiency and to enrich its contents.