A Comparative Study of the Japanese Case Particle から and the English Preposition From

Abstract

As an agglutinative language, Japanese relies on particles to connect sentence constituents. Though Japanese particles carry no lexical meaning and cannot be used independently, they constitute one of the core difficulties in Japanese learning. English, as an inflected language, realizes grammatical features through inflectional changes. English prepositions are also devoid of lexical meaning, yet they undertake the function of connecting nouns and verbs, which shares certain commonalities with Japanese particles. For most Chinese learners of Japanese who take English as their second foreign language, they tend to transfer the usage of the English preposition from to the acquisition of the Japanese case particle から at the initial learning stage. Such language transfer may exert a positive effect at the beginning. Nevertheless, the two differ greatly in syntactic position and semantic connotation. As learning deepens, negative transfer frequently occurs and hinders the improvement of Japanese proficiency. This paper compares the similarities and differences between the Japanese case particle から and the English preposition from, aiming to provide references for Japanese language learners.