(New) Ignacio López-Sako (University of Granada). Is Japanese hard to learn? Some considerations about the relationship between language, culture and communication, and their acquisition as a foreign language

When we learn a foreign language, we tend to believe that it all consists of memorizing a set of words and expressions (lexicon) and structures (grammar), and then use them correctly, often times without realizing what “correctly” actually means in communication. In fact, the endeavor of communicating with other people goes way beyond. In my talk, I will delve into the complex cultural, social, and communicative intricacies that need to be taken into account for a learner of the Japanese language to achieve a high or near-native competence in this language, such as the ability to “read the air” (空気を読む) (communicative context) for optimal communication, the role of silence, the conversation dynamics including gesture and proxemics, as well as the capacity to discern (弁え) the appropriate use of honorifics (敬語).

Bio

Nobuo Ignacio López-Sako (PhD) is Associate Professor at the University of Granada, where he is teaching Japanese Language and Linguistics in the BA degree in Modern Languages and Literatures and the MA Program in East Asian Studies (MUEAO).  He is also a visiting lecturer at the newly created Máster de Formación Permanente en Estudios Japoneses y Coreanos at Universitat de València. His main research interests revolve around Japanese (socio)pragmatics and sociolinguistics, with special focus on linguistic politeness and conversation analysis. He is also into the research on the acquisition of Japanese/Spanish as a foreign language using corpus and experimental methods. Since 2016, he is a founding member and former deputy director of BilinguaLab (https://bilingualab.ugr.es/), a Laboratory of bilingualism, acquisition and language processing located in UGR, which is an outcome of two national research grants between 2016 and 2025. In BilinguaLab, he is responsible for the linguistic corpus called JFLCorp (Japanese-as-a-Foreign-Language Corpus). Recent papers include “Ellipsis interpretations in L2 Japanese by Spanish learners”, published in Language and Culture 『言葉と文化』in 2023 together with Yamada Kazumi, Kizu Mika and Cristóbal Lozano, and “El ‘lenguaje de las mujeres’ en la construcción del Japón moderno: Invisibilización, subordinación, regulación y legitimación”, a book chapter in Estudios sobre las mujeres de Corea y Asia Oriental (Dykinson, 2025), edited by E.K. Kang.

Amparo Montaner (University of Valencia) The Role of Linguistic Models in the Contrastive and Applied Study of Spanish and Japanese

Contrastive and applied linguistics constitutes a field of particular relevance for Japanese studies. It enables the systematic analysis of contrasts between Spanish and Japanese at different linguistic and discursive levels, while also providing a theoretical framework that can be extended to disciplines which, although not primarily linguistic, address cultural, communicative, or educational phenomena related to both languages. This paper examines the role of linguistic models as approaches for interpreting the behavior of data and for enabling rigorous comparison between typologically distant systems. Examples of application will also be presented to illustrate the potential of this perspective to generate knowledge transferable to interdisciplinary contexts. Overall, it is argued that contrastive and applied linguistics offers a solid basis for intercultural dialogue within the framework of Japanese studies.

Bio

María Amparo Montaner Montava is Associate Professor in the area of ​​General Linguistics at the University of Valencia and has been coordinator of the East Asian Studies area at this same University. She directed and coordinated the area in the first ten years of its existence. She has collaborated with several universities and participated in numerous conferences, both in the area of ​​Linguistics and in the area of ​​East Asian Studies, with special dedication to issues of Spanish-Japanese contrastive Linguistics. In addition, she has received scholarships from national and foreign organizations and has carried out research and teaching stays at various universities in Europe, Asia and America, such as Salamanca (Center for Spanish-Japanese Studies), University of California in Berkeley, Santa Barbara or UVA (USA), Mainz and Leipzig (Germany), Aarhus (Denmark), Waseda (Japan), Guadalajara (Mexico), etc. She has published four books and dozens of articles and chapters on theoretical linguistics and on Japanese-Spanish contrastive Linguistics and the linguistic typology of East Asian languages ​​and the Japanese language. In this last field, she has published two monographs and numerous articles and book chapters in publishers such as Tirant lo Blanch (2017, 2019) or Dickynson (2022), among others, or magazines, such as Rilce (2014), Pragmalingüística (2022), Hikma (2022), LynX (2022), etc.

Funded by:

• Eurasia Foundation (from Asia)

In partnership with:

• Vicerectorat d’Internacionalització i Multilingüisme de la Universitat de València
• Departament de Teoria dels Llenguatges i Ciències de la Comunicació
• Institut Universitari de la Creativitat i Innovacions Educatives (IUCIE)
• Unitat d’Investigació Japón -Universitat de València (UIJ-UV)