Taishi Kobayashi Senior Assistant Professor 

Fields	German Linguistics, Theoretical Linguistics

When I first studied German and read a text on the philosopher Hannah Arendt in a reading class, I wondered why the author used “roundabout and cumbersome” phrases. At the time, I thought it was just the author’s habit. But as I continued to study German, I realized that such expressions, which at first glance seem “roundabout and cumbersome” to Japanese speakers, are indeed common in the German written language. The difference in structures in the two languages led to the impression of being “roundabout and cumbersome.” After realizing this, my image was replaced by the feeling of “enjoyable because it is different from Japanese.” Since then, I have studied the nominalization of verbs and articles to understand the characteristics of typical German expressions.