Thoughts On Educating Chinese Characters To Korean Learners Of Chinese Characters

This study suggests realistic education methodologies to the Korean reality through the comparison of Chinese characters and its education in Korea and China.Chapter 1 mainly talks about the background of this passage. In the second chapter, it introduces brief summary of Chinese characters, inquiries of the origins of Chinese characters in Korean history, the change in education of Chinese character since the Republic of Korea and the use and its phenomenon of Chinese characters in newspapers.Chapter 3 deals with education of the Chinese characters. Chinese character education in China can be divided into two parts. The first part is teaching Chinese characters to the native Chinese children, which is called 'Ordinary Chinese Character Teaching". The other part is called 'Chinese Character Teaching of foreigners', which the name of it gives away the meaning, teaching Chinese characters to speakers of other language. Teaching Chinese characters in Korea can be also divided into two parts. One is teaching Chinese characters that are in Korean literatures and the other is teaching Chinese characters that are in the language of Chinese. In this study, a comparison study of each teaching methods have been made and strengths and weaknesses have been identified. Also, it collects all the strengths and supplements the weaknesses.In chapter 4, it writes about a comparative study done of 3,500 mostly used Chinese characters in China and 1,800 Chinese characters in Korean education, which includes 1,000 Chinese characters in high school text books. Through this comparison study, a statistics was made of the correlation in Chinese characters between the two countries.This study takes the commonly used Chinese characters further and researches the variant Chinese Characters and the Chinese characters that are misused among them.And by further investigating those misused Chinese characters, this research finds the reasons of commonly made mistakes by the Korean students by Chinese Characters shape, sound and meaning. Then it goes ahead and suggests an education proposal to minimize those mistakes.In chapter 5, after analyzing the education methods of most commonly used Chinese characters, this research suggests education method of'shape of a character' to the Korean students, as it seems most appropriate to them.Lastly but not least, we have to emphasize the importance of educating 'simplified Chinese characters' because the shape of a character of the traditional Chinese character can be so different and has no relation to the simplified Chinese characters. This study also investigated simplified Chinese characters for the 1800 Chinese characters in Korean education and suggests education methods for simplified Chinese character to Korean education.