Indonesian Journal of Education and Social Humanities
Vol. 2 No. 4 (2025): DECEMBER 2025

A Contrastive Analysis of Beauty Adjectives in Japanese and Indonesian: Strategies for Developing Teaching Materials Based on Linguistic Intervention

Widyaningtyas, Ika Hervina (Unknown)



Article Info

Publish Date
31 Dec 2025

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the systemic differences between Japanese beauty adjectives (utsukushii, kirei, suteki) and Indonesian ones (indah, cantik, bagus) and to formulate strategies for developing teaching materials based on contrastive findings. The research employs a qualitative descriptive approach with syntactic and semantic contrastive analysis techniques. Data were drawn from Haruki Murakami's novel Noruwei no Mori and contemporary Indonesian novels. The results show three main findings: (1) there are significant differences in contextual meaning distribution, although syntactic functions are relatively similar; (2) kirei has semantic ambiguity (clean vs. beautiful) not found in cantik; (3) suteki is more subjective and evaluative compared to bagus. Based on these findings, this study proposes a contrastive-based framework for teaching material development focusing on addressing specific difficulties of Indonesian students. The pedagogical implications can serve as a reference for Japanese language teachers in developing more effective and contextual learning materials.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

ijesh

Publisher

Subject

Humanities Education

Description

Indonesian Journal of Education and Social Humanities (IJESH), the main focus is major issues in Teaching, Teaching Assessment, Learning Media, Education Subject Development, Education and Humanitarian Management, Citizenship education, Geography education, History education, Sociological education, ...