Introduction & Context

For this project, I(Julian Nassar) decided to focus on a topic that has always been a personal interest to me, meditation! I know how important spirituality and thoughtfulness are tied to Japanese history and culture and I wanted to take this opportunity to examine how meditation is viewed through a more critical and comfortable means. To that end, one article I chose is a self-meditation guide and is a much softer, friendly approach as it goes through meditation exercises for you to follow along with. The second article however is a more critical analysis of the benefits and usefulness of meditation for a business-minded individual and how that can be incorporated into a daily work-life schedule and the scientific benefits meditation can provide for the salaryman/woman and what overall benefits the exercises can do for better mindfulness and mentality. I thought this contrast of beginner’s introductory class to meditation and a more analytical article would be good for a language comparison in the vocabulary and diction used throughout. Let’s find out if I was correct!

The first is from Satori Reader, a website catering to many forms of media, stories, articles, and other things, but ultimately serves as a language shadowing website. With it, those looking to brush up on their Japanese skills can array a wide variety of media resources to practice pronunciation, dialect, vocabulary, and other speaking skills with live native audio. The article I specifically chose was an introductory lesson to begin understanding how to practice basic mediation skills. As a result, this article focuses much more on the repetition of more words that are verbs or actions and has a very serene and airy quality to the language used. The second article is from a website called dime.jp, which is also a multi-media article website that caters to all sorts of genres of media from technology to lifestyle, business, money, or just general news information, dime.jp caters to all. The website down to its basic color themes is much more serious in it’s application to Satori Reader, the main colors of the website being dark greys, black and white. However, what I do find interesting is that even though the level of text is much more varied in its content and skill level for clarity and understanding.

Materials and Analysis

This meditation lesson is clearly catered towards Japanese readers/listeners as it is almost exclusively hiragana and Kanji, and the complexity is kept to a minimum in order to be more inviting to a wider audience as an introductory class. As such most of the language is native Japanese words and most of the Sino-Japanese words are commonplace enough that most learning the language would be able to distinguish them easily enough. The article itself has a high concentration of verbs, almost all exclusively Native Japanese. I believe this is intentional to promote a relaxed comfortable atmosphere that can be enjoyed by as many as possible. SJ words have a tendency to denote a state of seriousness and intensity that can be intimidating to find yourself in the middle of and given that this article is an introductory lesson into actually practicing meditation, I believe the simplified language plays to the strength of the audience the lesson is trying to reach. There was an absence of English words and seldom any Foreign Loan words as to indicate that this meditation was solely Japanese focused and not necessarily intended for an international audience, but given the nature of SatoriReader, it is accessible to almost anyone with a basic understanding of HIragana thanks to the accessible translation and definition software built into understanding the kanji throughout the lesson. It was surprising to observe as many kanji as there were in the article but many of them were immediately identifiable by the て form, as most of the verbs were directions to follow along with the lesson like with 吸って, 集中してみて, and so on.

The article from dime.jp had much more variation in the type of words displayed, including more loan words and even minimal use of English words in reference to major internet websites. Seeing as this website caters to a much larger and broader audience than Satori Reader, it makes sense that the end result is a wider net of language and words captured throughout the article. Sino-Japanese words are much more dominant in this article due to the fact that it is trying to convey scientific research about the long-term benefits of meditation as well as what it can do for those in the workplace. As discussed earlier, SJ words have an impartial, serious tonal shift in them that cues the reader into the facts and information being given out throughout the article. Words like 研究結果, 解放され, and 提唱 denote the academic background that is appropriate for the business-like conversation of which SJ vocabulary is both preferred and somewhat expected. However this article does use some words in hiragana instead of kanji such as さまざまな and ところ, and also even uses the English words for major companies such as Facebook, Yahoo, and Google. I believe this usage of English was intentional in order to really get readers to hone in on the fact that these major companies who are successful are proponents of the idea of mindfulness that is the root of why the expert argues meditation is recommended for a better emotional state and performance in the workplace.

Summary

Comparing and contrasting these two articles regarding the topic of meditation has illustrated to me just how wide a difference they can make it target audiences and overall mood and atmosphere that aligns with the website branding. Satori reader encourages simplistic vocabulary that aligns with their teaching and learning focus and the meditative lesson there imposes succinct, easy to understand exercises and questions using predominantly NJ words in order to be accessible and promote a light and airy feeling that is conducive to the meditation environment. In contrast, the dime.jp article focuses on SJ vocabulary to conform with its more serious color palette, and the fact that the article in question is appealing to those of the salaryman/salary woman industry is reflected in the vocabulary used that that audience would respond to with. Cleverly using foreign loan words and even English words to key readers into important points and reinforcing their advice with the serious SJ vocabulary to denote the scientifically researched benefits meditation has to offer was an amazing experience to research. Japanese advertisers and website creators pay careful attention to detail, diction, and syntax in the creation of everything they do and the words chosen will reflect the audience they are trying to receive!