한국어의 음절구조 관점에서 본 일본어 특수박의 발음교육

Teaching pronunciation of Japanese morae

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of a teaching method on morae in Japanese by comparing syllable structures in Korean and Japanese. Generally, Korean speakers of Japanese tend to ignore a rhythmic unit, a mora, and regard special phoneme /N, Q/ as codas of a syllable resulting in a shortage of a number of mora. This paper, therefore, focuses on a number of mora using a Korean syllable structure. The special phonemes /N, Q/ are represented by a new syllable to describe the rhythmic unit in a satisfactory way. In order to create this new syllable, one vowel and one consonant were combined by extending a vowel before special phonemes /N, Q/ and a variant based on the place of articulation of a special phoneme. Subjects were six students enrolled in college. The production tests were conducted to assess the subjects’ language proficiency as a pre-test, and two hour training sessions were carried out with explicit production practice as described above for a total period of three weeks. The results for the production tests revealed that there were statistically significant differences between the pre-/post-tests (64.2 vs. 89.3). However, it was found that the more complex the syllable structure, the harder it was acquired even after the lessons. It should be emphasized that the teaching method using a syllable structure of Korean for Japanese morae was extremely effective when observed pre and post test.