Characteristics of Neesima’s English Letters: From the Viewpoint of Readability and Vocabulary

1. Characteristics of Neesima’s English Letters:From the Viewpoint of Readability and Vocabulary November 26, 2009 Kenji Kitao http://kkitao.e-learning-server.com/ kitao/Tubingen/Neesima.ppt

2. Neesima’s English • Almost none in Japan • Learned from Captain Taylor on the Wild Rover • Still very poor when he arrived in Boston in 1865 • Could not communicate with Hardys and wrote a statementto explain why he came to the United States

3. Readability (Word or Internet) tokens No. of characters No. of words No. of sentences characters per word syllables per word words per sentence FKGL

4. 5 Passages

5. Research Questions • How much did Neesima improve his English? • How rich was Neesima’s vocabulary? • What are characteristics of his word use? • Are Neesima’s letters to Mrs. Hardy different from others?

6. Data and Tools Used Neesima Corpus ３２８　letters 　　１８６４－１８９０ Source: Neesima Zenshu Vols 6 & 7 Tests Document Readability And Improve It AntConc (Filtered Word Frequencies For English Language)

7. Words Used by Neesima

8. Number of Letters per Year

9. Tokens (all words)

10. Number of Sentences

11. Number of Syllables per Word

12. No. of Words per Sentence

13. Readability (FKGL)

14. Neesima’s English improved until 1872, but we do not see any pattern of readability change after that.

15. JACET8000 (VLC)

16. Frequency of Words

17. Neesima wrote very personal letters. I, my, me we, our you, your Neesima wrote about himself a lot. I 5929 times, 4% of all texts; more frequent than “the”

18. No content words among the top 30 most frequently used words.

19. To Susan Hardy To Susan Hardy 50 letters To the Hardys (except Susan alone) 64 letters To others 214 letters

20. token type To Susan Hardy 200473054 To Others 1013225324 (about 5 times more)

22. Neesima wrote about himself more to Mrs. Hardy than to others.

24. Neesima wrote less about his correspondent when writing to Mrs. Hardy than when writing to others.

27. Neesima wrote more about the subject of religion, religious practice, faith, and so on, to Mrs. Hardy than to others.

28. Further study • Analyzing the content of the letters • What kind of information he gave Mrs. Hardy about himself, as opposed to others • What aspects of his religious faith and practice he discussed with Mrs. Hardy and others

29. Reference • Joseph Hardy Neesima--From birth to flight from Japan (1843-1864)— • Neesima's Writings • Chronology of Joseph Hardy Neesima • My Younger Days

30. Appendices • Neesima Corpus • Readability • Words Used in Letters • Frequency of Words • Comparison of Letters: to Mrs. Hardy and to Others • Neesima Corpus(Download 328letters)

31. The End