Research Paper
Year: 2019 | Month: November | Volume: 6 | Issue: 11 | Pages: 99-104
The Students’ Ability in Japanese Free-Writing (Sakubun)
Yuddi Adrian Muliadi, Siti Muharami Malayu, Nandi S.
Faculty of Cultural Sciences, University of Sumatera Utara, Indonesia
Corresponding Author: Siti Muharami Malayu
ABSTRACT
Writing essays or stories is called sakubun in Japanese. When willing to convey an idea or ideas into essays, learners must master the language skills, such as Japanese characters (Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji), vocabulary, sentence patterns, auxiliary words (particles), and expressions. However, because of different structure between Indonesian and Japanese, Japanese non native learners face problems. The study tries to measure the ability of non-native learners to make essays in Japanese. There were nine respondents from the Japanese Literature Study Program at the Faculty of Cultural Sciences, University of Sumatra Utara (USU) and six respondents from the Japanese Language Study Program at the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education, University of Riau (UNRI). The respondents were university students who passed the international examination in Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) at / N3 level. The purpose of this study is to analyze the types of errors that are mostly found in the translation from Indonesian essays into Japanese, as well as to describe the factors underlying the occurrence of errors. The research used qualitative and quantitative methods and the percentage of errors is measured. Errors among students were caused by word choice, auxiliary verbs, particle words, sentence structure, and translation abilities. Translation errors by students from USU and UNRI were reaching 4.12% and 1.34% respectively. All this means that they were weak in vocabularies. The dominant factor causing errors is the errors transfer, that is, habits from first language are applied to the learning of foreign language which has different language systems.
Key words: Ability, free writing, sakubun, Japanese
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