Cognitive effects of the LV Approach on kanji learners: A novel approach using learner's personal visual cognition

Abstract

This study focuses on the issue of how kanji learners mentally “deconstruct” a kanji as they view it and how they may update this visual deconstruction over time as they learn kanji. The research problem deals with the question of whether or not an innovative kanji learning approach, the “Learner's Visualization (LV) Approach”, assists learners in significantly updating their personal kanji deconstruction visualization (which refers to how the learner visually divides a given kanji into smaller, manageable parts). With the LV Approach, in contrast to other kanji learning approaches, kanji learners themselves decide which way to divide a kanji into smaller parts, allowing them to thus choose the complexity level and number of parts of that particular kanji according to their personal visual cognition. To support the analysis of the kanji visualization process, we developed a kanji learning support system based on the LV Approach. The analysis of our results proves the existence of the positive effect of using this novel approach in kanji learning; learners progressively move towards visually dividing kanji into fewer and fewer blocks.