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Memorising kanji readings is one of the biggest hurdles when learning Japanese. The Kanji Code teaches a systematic method of learning the readings of kanji or Chinese characters. By studying phonetic components and other visual clues, students of Japanese can reduce their reliance on rote memorisation and feel more in control of their learning.
This classified and annotated research bibliography is meant to serve as an introduction to the rich field of Japanese psycholinguistics, by providing an exhaustive inventory of what has been done in or about Japanese in a psycholinguistic sense. Thus, this volume captures the tradition of psycholinguistic research currently being pursued in Japan, its history and development over the past thirty years, and its current directions and research themes, as well as international research in modern psycholinguistics which targets the Japanese language as the focal point of empirical procedures or deductive analysis in psychology, linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science. The bibliography supports a broad view of psycholinguistics, acknowledging that psycholinguistic research in how natural language is learned, produced, comprehended, stored, and recalled now reaches beyond its traditional roots in the two disciplines of psychology and linguistics. The interested scholar will thus find entries from the traditional core of psycholinguistic research on natural language, as well as entries from related areas which have either influence or been influenced by psycholinguistic work on Japanese. Every article, text, and edited volume listed in the bibliography is available through normal library channels, and is thus accessible to the scholar interested in what psycholinguistic research has been done in or on the Japanese language, in Japan and internationally. The annotations for each entry have been especially written for this bibliographic inventory, and with the linguist, psychologist, and psycholinguist specifically in mind. The authors' intention is to maximize the usefulness of such an inventory by preparing annotations for the interested reader who wishes to know not only what the article contains but where it fits in the research tradition.
This volume presents articles important to contemporary studies of the cultural and contextual foundations of human development. It address es the need to create a Psychology which focuses upon the actions of people participating in routine, culturally organized activities. The discussion includes: the nature of context; experiments as contexts; culture-historical theories of culture, context and development; the analysis of classroom settings as a social important context of development, the psychological analysis of activity in situ, and questions of power and discourse.
"The Encyclopedia of Microcomputers serves as the ideal companion reference to the popular Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology. Now in its 10th year of publication, this timely reference work details the broad spectrum of microcomputer technology, including microcomputer history; explains and illustrates the use of microcomputers throughout academe, business, government, and society in general; and assesses the future impact of this rapidly changing technology."
First Published in 1995. The nature of the Japanese script has been a matter of contention since the early Meiji period. It was not until 1902, however, that the government was convinced of the need to simplify the written language. The modernised system of kana usage and the guidelines on the use, shape and readings are thoroughly discussed in this book alongside the political nature of Japan's multiple written languages. This title has involved interviews with many of the key players in the post-war period as well as research on the vast amount of primary source material on the topic.
Originally published in 1986, this stimulating and unorthodox book integrates the major findings of hemispheric research with the larger questions of how the brain stores and transmits information – the ‘brain code’. Norman Cook emphasizes how the two cerebral hemispheres communicate information over the corpus callosum, the largest single nerve tract of the human brain. Excitatory mechanisms are involved in the duplication of information between the hemispheres; in contrast, inhibitory mechanisms are implicated in the production of hemispheric asymmetries and, crucially, in high-level cognitive phenomena such as the right hemisphere’s role in providing the ‘context’ within which left hemispheric verbal information is placed. These callosal mechanisms of information transfer are not only fundamental to the brain code; they are the simplest and most easily demonstrated ways in which the neocortex ‘talks to itself’. The Brain Code demonstrates how popular topics within psychology at the time, such as laterality, hemisphere differences and the psychology of left and right, are central to further progress in understanding the human brain. This book provides stimulating reading for students of psychology, artificial intelligence and neurophysiology, as well as anyone interested in the broader question of how the brain works.
Following the first volume of Remembering the Kanji, the present work provides students with helpful tools for learning the pronunciation of the kanji. Behind the notorious inconsistencies in the way the Japanese language has come to pronounce the characters it received from China lie several coherent patterns. Identifying these patterns and arranging them in logical order can reduce dramatically the amount of time spent in the brute memorization of sounds unrelated to written forms. Many of the “primitive elements,” or building blocks, used in the drawing of the characters also serve to indicate the “Chinese reading” that particular kanji use, chiefly in compound terms. By learning one of the kanji that uses such a “signal primitive,” one can learn the entire group at the same time. In this way, Remembering the Kanji 2 lays out the varieties of phonetic pattern and offers helpful hints for learning readings, that might otherwise appear completely random, in an efficient and rational way. Individual frames cross-reference the kanji to alternate readings and to the frame in volume 1 in which the meaning and writing of the kanji was first introduced. A parallel system of pronouncing the kanji, their “Japanese readings,” uses native Japanese words assigned to particular Chinese characters. Although these are more easily learned because of the association of the meaning to a single word, the author creates a kind of phonetic alphabet of single syllable words, each connected to a simple Japanese word, and shows how they can be combined to help memorize particularly troublesome vocabulary. The 4th edition has been updated to include the 196 new kanji approved by the government in 2010 as “general-use” kanji.
Written by the co-managers of the Kermit Project, this is a revised and updated tutorial on data communications, with new material on today's high-speed modems and how to make the best use of them
