Many of the science majors from non-Kanji backgrounds have great difficulty in learning Kanji used in technical Japanese. Science major students on the pre-undergraduate program at JLC struggle to learn a huge amount of Kanji words in their science classes. For those students, Kanji words which appear in the textbook for “Fundamentals of Natural Science (hereafter F.N.S)” are the first and probably the most difficult “hurdle” to overcome, as they are way beyond the students’ knowledge of Kanji obtained from any elementary Japanese classes taken by that time. This study was conducted in order to identify a set of Kanji characters and Kanji words with high degree of significance for the effective learning of F.N.S., aiming at developing Kanji learning materials for science majors.
Kanji words which appear in the F.N.S. textbook was 4,229 including 631 different words in number and consist of 420 different Kanji characters. From an analysis on degree of significance of words, 82 Kanji words were identified as the most significant words for the effective learning of F.N.S. The 82 Kanji words cover 60% of all the Kanji words which appear in the textbook. By the same token, 90 Kanji characters included in the 82 words were identified as the most significant characters for F.N.S., which cover over 70% of all the characters in the textbook. Moreover, of the 90 characters, 67 characters (74.4%) overlap with the 284 characters, those most frequently used in chemical engineering, which in turn indicates that studying these 90 characters will lead to more successful learning of a wider range of technical words in the fields of science than those in F.N.S.