An Analysis On The Errors Of The Acquiring Near-synonymous Verbs For South Korean Intermediate And Advanced Chinese Learners

Near-synonyms are highly important in the Chinese vocabulary system. The foreign learners should acquire near-synonyms in order to express their own thoughts and feelings accurately and precisely when communicating with Chinese speakers.Similarities in meanings and difficulties of discrimination make it hard for foreign students to improve their language skills.Acquiring near-synonyms is also one of the difficulties in the Chinese learning process for intermediate and advanced South Korean Chinese learners.The latter will easily get confused since part of the’Chinese words’that Koreans use have the same characteristics but different meanings and usages from actual Chinese words.As a Korean learner, I experienced the same as others do.The near-synonymous verbs are very important elements in sentence construction. They are numerous and have flexible usages that make learners misunderstand.To understand the errors that intermediate and advanced Korean learners normally make, I chose39pairs of near-synonyms out of2500words. All the39pairs are frequently used and thus can easily lead to error. I designed a test and questionnaire to invest the conditions. I also conducted several interviews with language learners and teachers. I subsequently analyzed the error types and their causes based on all of these materials.The specific error types can be divided into two groups:intralingual errors and Chinese-Korean interlingual errors. The causes might relate to learners’ language knowledge, personal factors and learning environment.We found that errors were more likely to occur whenever intermediate and advanced Korean learners used near-synonymous verbs very frequently. In general, intermediate learners tend to make more mistakes than advanced learners.The specific errors the two types of learners made are different, and so are their causes. Among all the reasons that could cause the errors of near-synonymous verbs, factor related to language knowledge are the main ones.According to this, I proposed near-synonyms’ teaching strategies. For example, teachers should strengthen Chinese-Korean contrast teaching and focus on discriminations of morpheme meanings. Hopefully, this paper will provide some help for teaching Korean learners Chinese near-synonymous verbs and for future reference.