Yao YAO　Senior Assistant Professor

Fields	Chinese Linguistics, Japanese Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
Researcher’s Data

I am from Shanghai, China. I was majoring in Chinese Linguistics at Fudan University. After getting my PhD degree, I worked as a university lecturer in China, conducting studies on historical linguistics, specifically the lexical and grammatical developments in Ancient Chinese. When I was researching the history of Chinese language, I became interested in Sino-Japanese vocabulary in classical Japanese works and wanted to learn more about the history of Japanese language. To be able to do proper research on Japanese, I came to Japan in my late 30’s, studying Japanese Linguistics at Tohoku University and earned my second PhD degree.

Now I am conducting research that spanned the fields of Japanese and Chinese, ancient languages and modern languages. While continuing my study on the relationship between Japanese and Chinese, I also try my best to introduce the interesting research themes I am engaged in to my students, helping them get interested and motivated to learn Chinese.