A Comparative Study On Vocabularies In Korean Textbooks In China And Korea

With Korea’s strength growing increasingly, its culture has become more and more popular in recent years, which can best be proved by the prevalence of Korean language learning around the world. China and Korea have set up cooperative relations in such fields as culture and economy since the two countries established diplomatic relationship in1992. And this has advanced further exchanges and integrations in culture, entertainment and education, etc. Under such circumstance, the education of Korean as a foreign language in China has developed on a certain scale.The result in a2010research shows that the number of domestic universities including private universities and academies that open Korean learning specialties, has greatly increased from20in2007to250in2010. Among all the international students in Korea, Chinese students are about57,000, accounting for70%according to the statistic in April2010. Such a phenomenon indicates the number of people intending to work or study in Korea is growing. No matter what their purposes are, the abilities in listening and speaking are needed. Therefore, emphasis should be put on teaching students how to use the language and moderate reforms of teaching method should be conducted, for example, a gradual change from’literal translation-type teaching method’mainly for grammar and reading to ’communicative teaching method’centered on speaking.’Communicative teaching method’aims at teaching a language through daily communication. Since1990, communicative teaching has been gradually valued and recognized. For foreign learners, the most important and difficult vocabularies also draw extensive attentions from scholars and learners. To learn a foreign language is all about the abilities of listening, speaking, reading and writing. In the process of learning the four skills, the learners will have to learn the knowledge about pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar, etc. Among them, the most difficult for the learners is vocabulary due to the fact that the abilities in listening and reading can only be achieved after the master of vocabularies. Though familiar with grammatical structures, the learners can still not achieve the goal of using the language fluently without knowing and understanding vocabularies sufficiently or mastering enough vocabularies. In the process of learning, Chinese learners are usually affected by the Chinese characters in Korean, and communicating is also hindered by the improper use of Chinese characters. It is therefore concluded that Korean vocabularies are the basic for all Korean learners including Chinese, and the basic to evaluate the learners’abilities of using the language.To help beginners avoid making mistakes in using wrong vocabularies and improperly using vocabularies, more efforts should be put into the research on the methods of vocabulary teaching and the practical methods of reminding vocabularies in order to lay a solid foundation for the learning of vocabularies at middle and high levels. The research of this paper is based on the Basic Korean Ⅰ-Ⅱ published in China for Chinese college students used by Yanbian University for intensive reading and the Korean Primary Level Ⅰ-Ⅱ compiled for foreign learners published in Korea. The vocabularies at primary level in the four books are categorized in three aspects of structure, meaning and derivation, and effective methods of reminding and teaching vocabularies are stated accordingly so as to make it easier for the beginners to learn and use Korean.