Semantic transparency and analysability of Japanese and English compound words

Since Japanese and English belong to two different language families and they are typologically different, the differences between them are relatively easy to discuss. Some people may perceive the similarities shared by Japanese and English as surprising. Even though the topic of similarities between English and Japanese is often discussed in the literature, the subject of compound words appears to be a neglected field of discussion. This paper depicts similarities between Japanese and English compound words regarding their analysability, structure, and semantic transparency. It includes a review of selected papers and the results of my own semantic and morphological analysis of 38 Japanese and 38 English compound words selected from various sources. To provide a more general perspective on similarities between English and Japanese compounds, examples included in this work are not limited in meaning, context, or discipline. However, to make the project more concise, the English examples are narrowed to solid and hyphenated compounds. The meanings provided in this work are taken from four online dictionaries, two English (Oxford English Online Dictionary and Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Online) and two Japanese (Tangorin and Jisho). The analysis shows that the semantic transparency and the analysability of selected compounds are relatively high. These results suggest that learning compounds by the association could be as effective as memorisation. Additionally, the results of the analysis are compared with the comments on learning by the association in some recent articles. This paper is merely a general framework that in the future could be applied to verify the learning efficiency results of language learning groups.