A Comparative Study Of Chinese And Korean Greetings

As the basis of communication, greetings play an important role in everybody’s daily life. Especially for foreign language learners, the study of greetings is both important and difficult. Being geographically neighbored, China and South Korea pay much attention to etiquette culture under the influence of Confucianism since ancient times. So greetings between these two countries must have much in common. However, due to the different life custom and language habits, there are also many differences in the use of greetings between the two peoples. Accordingly, this paper was aimed at comparing greetings in special situation between Chinese and Korean. It is hoped that this paper can give some help to the language learners of the two countries in understanding and using the Chinese and Korean greetings correctly.In this paper, a questionnaire survey was carried out on the Chinese and Korean common people aged 10 and 70 about their use statuses of greetings in visiting a patient, sending condolences, sending New Year’s blessings and sending birthday wishes. From this survey, we analyse and compared the rate of greetings, the greeting types, and the different use statuses accoeding to the closeness degree, social status and the gender of users in the above four situations between the two peoples. Finally, this paper compared the linguistic and cultural features of greetings between Chinese and Korean through the above analysis.