Comprehending Technical Japanese

Comprehending Technical Japanese
Author: Edward E.Daub, R.Byron Bird, Nobuo Inoue
Number of Pages: 436
Format: djvu

Japan is one of the leading technological nations in the world. Although its scientific and engineering achievements have been most impressive, few scientists and engineers have developed the ability to read the literature of their Japanese counterparts. There are several reasons for this:
(a) the extensive efforts of the Japanese to learn Western languages and their willingness to share their research results in those tongues;
(b) the complexity of the Japanese language for foreigners; and
(c) the absence of appropriate instructional materials for scientists and engineers. These points are discussed here briefly.
Although much of Japan's scholarly research has been published in English and other languages, there remains a vast literature of patents, handbooks, engineering journals, government reports, and transactions of technical meetings which is not normally translated. Furthermore there is substantial interest in graduate and postdoctoral study in Japan, joint US-Japan research projects, and multinational industrial ventures. All these activities serve to emphasize the need for providing more people with the opportunity to learn that part of the Japanese language which is vital to them, namely the technical part.
The Japanese used in modern technical writing is not nearly as difficult as that encountered in the literary or the spoken language. Written technical Japanese is considerably more direct in grammar and style than the literary language with its delightful nuances and tantalizing ambiguities. Large segments of Japanese grammar, such as humble and honorific verbs, irregular "counters", words for family relationships, the verbs for giving and receiving, the formulas for polite requests, and the whole hierarchy of greetings and apologies are entirely absent.
Moreover, surprisingly, causatives, desideratives, alternatives, the -masu conjugation, and other verb forms do not occur frequently. The basic grammar needed to read scientific texts is remarkably limited and can be easily mastered. The big hurdle—and this cannot be minimized—is the development of a recognitional knowledge of the Chinese characters, the kanji.
Until the publication of this book there has been no reader designed specifically to meet the needs of the scientist or engineer. Concerned with the efficient use of his time, the technical man may wonder which of the approximately 2000 kanji he should learn first in order to gain access to Japanese technical literature. In the preparation of this book, therefore, we have stressed the mastery of the five-hundred most important kanji, and the scientific vocabulary which can be on physics, chemistry, and biology texts. We believe that the mastery of the five-hundred kanji emphasized in this book will provide a very sound basis for technical reading.

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