FORM ACQUISITION OF THAI STUDENTS STUDYING JAPANESE LANGUAGE

Premvadee  Na Nakornpanom

Premvadee Na Nakornpanom Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University, Bangkok, Thailand

Keywords: Acquisition, Japanese language, Conjugation, Forms

Abstract

Japanese verb conjugations are studied by many researchers; especially conjugation of verb -te form since it is used as conjugations to create other tenses or grammatical expressions in Japanese. In addition, it was reported that the verb - te form was a big challenge for students studying Japanese language as their foreign language. Therefore, this study focused on study in what extent Thai beginners of Japanese acquire the te - form acquisition. The research used a combination of qualitative and quantitative means for data collection with 30 second - year students majoring in English. The results revealed that the difficulty of - te form acquisition for the students depends on forms. They used overgeneralization to the verbs when they were not sure in which group the word belongs to. It indicated that rule-based knowledge is essential for students’ acquisition of verb-te from.