A Comparative Study On Color Idiomatic Expressions Between Korean And Chinese

People’s lives are dependent on language. Moreover, a thing that people seeall the time in their lives is color. Language and color are things we take in naturallywithout purposefully thinking about them.Along with the boom of globalization, there is active exchange of culture andlanguage going on. Thus, there are a lot of students who go abroad to learn anotherlanguage and they earn knowledge and hardships through that process.A commonly experienced difficulty for students studying abroad is the difficultyinvolving the comparison of their native language and the newly learnt foreignlanguage. Thus, there are a lot of linguists who spend their time comparing languagesor performing experiments on different languages.Similarly Korea and China also have similarities and differences between theirlanguages. They are distance-wise close countries and are related through history andculture. This paper is focused on the cultural meaning of color words, the meaning ofcolor phrases, and the comparison of their grammatical structures in Korea and China.This study was done placing the basis of color words (blue, yellow, black, white, andred) as the color words that are most commonly included in idioms. A ‘standardKorean dictionary’, a ‘Chinese idiom dictionary’, and a ‘modern Chinese standarddictionary’published at a national Korean study institute were used to collect idioms.Korean idiomatic phrases are a part of idioms, most are composed of fourcharacters, and since many were from China there were lots with similar grammaticalformat and meaning. However, China’s红颜薄命in Korea doesn’t use the idiomaticmeaning inside the ‘red’but instead uses explicit phrases:(a beautiful woman).In Korea this phrase is used as and.Korean color words include a lot of derivatives so it is possible to explain theamount and the depth of a color. On the other hand, we can see that for Chinese, inorder to have more meaning added to the colors, words were used to aid the noun.The investigation on color words and idioms is going on currently but the exactdifference and the definition is not set yet. This is probably because the language isalways developing, unique characteristics between countries is becoming blur, andbecause a lot of cross-culture can be seen a lot.Comparisons between native language and foreign language should be activelydone continuously and this paper is hoping to activate language exchange betweenKorea and China. Moreover is hoping to give help to teachers who teach languagesand to the students who learn them.