The Contrast On Korean And Chinese Ways Of Expressing Numbers

The category of numbers is very important in learning a foreign language. In linguistics, it means the singular and plural forms of nouns, and different languages have different ways of expressing numbers.In Korean and Chinese, it is very complicate to express plural forms. Sometimes it surpasses the grammatical level and makes it hard to master, therefore, the Korean students don't have a firm grasp of the category of plural forms in Chinese.We need to compare how the Korean and Chinese express plural forms and figure out what the similarities and differences are in the ways of conveying. In this study, we compare not only the ways of expressing plural forms in the grammatical level, but also extend the meaning of plural forms from the view point of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language, into all the forms that can express plural forms of nouns in a sentence. Through this we can find out the corresponding ways of expressing plural forms in Korean and Chinese, and compare them through semantic meaning, grammar, and pragmatics.We discovered that Korean and Chinese have many ways to express plural forms of nouns:Korean has(?)and Chinese has men们,superposition method, lexical method, and other grammatical methods.(?) and men们are similar in forms, but their usages in expressing numbers are different. Because many Korean students do not know enough about the different ways of expressing plural forms in these two languages, they tend to generalize the similar points, which lead to errors.In other words, these two languages have both similar and different points in expressing plural forms. Moreover, there is no one-to-one correspondence in the ways of expressing plural forms.Sometimes they have cross meanings, at other times they have the one-to-many relationships.All these situations bring about many difficulties in learning the category of plural forms in Chinese. Based on the contrast of the two languages, this study analyzes the difficulties in learning the category of plural forms in Chinese for Korean students, and will provide the basis for further Chinese teaching as a second language.