Indonesian Students' Level of Understanding of Japanese collocations with Structured Nouns and Verbs

Abstract

This study aims to identify the level of Japanese language learners' comprehension of collocation. The data was obtained from the collocation test given to 72 Japanese language learners who use Indonesian language as first language and have taken approximately 600 hours of Japanese language learning. The results of this study are: 1) the level of Japanese learners' understanding of collocations is still very low, approximately at the level of 50%; 2) There is a tendency that learners more easily understand collocations that can be translated directly or collocations that can be traced down to each word that forms them. Direct translation into first language is something second language (L2) learners often encounter in the early to intermediate stages of learning Goi 'vocabulary'; 3) Collocations that are close to idiomatic expressions which in this study are called collocations for Japanese learners are difficult to understand. It is proved by the very low percentage of correct answers with only 13%.