類義語｢気分｣｢気持｣｢機嫌｣の 使用実態について

Acquisition of Synonyms Kibun, Kimothi, Kigen

This study examines the acquisition situation, along with the meaning and usage of “kibun” “kimothi” “kigen,”as used to express the speaker’s physical condition. In the examination of the colloquial use of “kibun,” “kimothi,” and “kigen,” I searched Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese through the concordancer “syounagon” ‘KOTONOHA’. According to a Japanese questionnaire survey, Japanese people do not seem to have much difficulty in distinguishing between “kibun,” “kimothi,” and “kigen”. However, they cause Korean Japanese learners a certain degree of confusion as all three words “kibun,” “kimothi,” “kigen” are translated into “KIBUN” in Korean and differ from the Korean usage. The overall correct answer rate among the Korean Japanese learners is 73.3%, which is considerably lower than the overall correct answer rate of 94.0% among the Japanese respondents. The rate of the correct answer for each item is as follows: 77.9% for “kibun”, which is the highest among the three items, 70.8% for “kimothi” and 71.5% for “kigen”. The reason for the relatively high rate of the correct answer for “kibun” can be influenced by the presence of Korean “KIBUN”. Because there is not much difference in the correct answer rates among the three words, it can be inferred that the acquisition of “kibun,” “kimothi,” and “kigen” is not related to the learner’s level of Japanese. Even if the learner’s Japanese improves, the influence of Korean will continue for the time being.