Purpose

The purpose of this site is to prepare learners to interact with Japanese as it is actually spoken on the ground, something that is typically skipped or glossed over in most college and university courses. Because Kansai is the area where the most common non-standard dialect (Kansai-ben) is spoken, and a significant part of Japanese media includes this dialect, this site has been created to help learners and teachers understand Kansai-ben.

The fact is that Japanese language learners study standard Japanese almost exclusively, but in Japan, when visiting, working, or coming into contact with media, they will likely have experiences with non-standard--though common--Japanese. Moreover, the dynamic between standard Japanese and various dialects is an important part of how Japanese relate to their own language. Unfortunately, most teaching materials are in standard Japanese, and many teachers may lack the ability or experience to effectively teach about dialects. Moreover, dialects can be used as a window into Japanese culture.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Professor Masahiko Minami and Assistant Professor Tomoko Takeda for their invaluable assistance, support, and guidance during this project and during my time at San Francisco State University.

And my thanks to Professor Midori McKeon and Associate Professor Makiko Asano for teaching me about Japanese and helping me to get to the point of this project.

I would also like to give a more broad thanks to the Japanese Department at San Francisco State University for this opportunity.

My thanks also to the people who kindly let me record them, and without which this project would not have been fully realized: Nobuhiko Izumi, Fumi Izumi, Masayoshi Kojima, Maeda Wood Miki, Hisayo Ono, Haruka Shinkura, Ryo Takada, Yuko Yamano, Masayoshi Yasuda, Atsushi Yukawa and others.

I would like to thank the people who helped translate and edit this site during its creation: Nicholas March,

Finally, my deepest thanks to my husband Seth Carbon for his technical knowledge, editorial, advice, support, and encouragement in things small and large.

Authorship and Usage

This site was initially created as a Master of Arts project by Keiko Yukawa at San Francisco State University, and is currently maintained by her.

Unless otherwise noted on the copyright page, this site and its contents are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License by Keiko Yukawa.

Contact

For any inquiries, please contact "keiko" at this domain (kansaibenkyou.net).

Other

For information about the copyright of the media used on this site, the development of this site, or the bibliographic information for the materials used to create this site, please see their respective pages under the About navigation item in the side menu.