Comparative Study Of Contemporary Chinese And Sino-Korean Vocabulary

Chinese Proficiency Test (HSK), originally created to assess the language skill of foreign students, has become the world's most prestigious test to measure Chinese skills. With the increasing number of Chinese learners around the world, HSK has been attracting more and more interest in recent years. In particular, Korea is one of those countries, actively utilizing HSK to measure people's Chinese skill level, ranked No 1 in the applicant number of the test.It's often said that one's degree of command of a language depends on his amount of knowledge on its vocabulary. Accordingly, the core objects of the study on this paper include Chinese vocabulary on the outline of Chinese Language Proficiency Test Level that China National Committee of HSK publicized. With focus on 2-syllable words among the words on the outline, I've proceeded with the research further, successfully managing to acquire additional words from personal experiences of the 10-year Chinese learning and about a year of Korean teaching to Chinese people. By adding these newly identified words to those core words listed on the outline of the Chinese Language Proficiency Test Level, the final number of target words for the study reaches at 2986. The composition of2986 words is as follows by 5 categories; 'Synonyms in same forms', absolute majority of 5 categories, accounts for 73.6% with 2199 words; 'Homographs' for 3.8 % with 114 words; 'Conditional homographs' for 9.5% with 284 words, 'Synonyms in different forms' for 12.9% with 384 words; 'Heterographs' with different meanings for 0.2% with 5 words.The paper is designed and written to help both teachers and students of the Chinese and Korean languages in their teaching and learning efforts by concise explanations and practical classifications, acquired from comparative study of contemporary Chinese and Sino-Korean Vocabulary. I hope this paper will eventually help people learn Korean and Chinese more easily and effectively.The paper is composed of four parts:Part I, introduction of the research, briefly introduces its purpose and tasks, study scope and methodology, reviews of the previous papers with similar topics, and lastly its meaning and possible applications in the near future. Part II: The understanding of contemporary Chinese and Sino-Korean vocabulary (or Hanja-eo) which refers to the set of words in the Korean language that originated from or were influenced by Chinese language. This section discusses the formation process and characteristics of contemporary Chinese and Sino-Korean vocabulary. Accounting for more than 60% of all Korean words, Sino-Korean vocabulary has changed in their forms and meanings since their introduction to Korea long time ago, which makes it important to understand the formation process and characteristics of contemporary Chinese and Sino-Korean vocabulary.Part III: Comparative study of contemporary Chinese and Sino-Korean vocabulary.In part III, the paper progresses its research into the contemporary Chinese and Sino-Korean vocabulary with 5 different categories, using the methodology of classification and comparison. As the paper's written in all related languages - Korean, Chinese Simplified, and Traditional Chinese, both Chinese and Korean learners will be able to utilize this paper as their learning material without difficulties. Comparing contemporary Chinese with Sino-Korean vocabulary, the paper classifies them in 5 main categories, and classifies some of them again in sub-categories, where required, with lots of practical explanations and examples for learners'better understanding.In Part IV, the paper summarizes research findings again, and describes future tasks, not covered in the paper for reasons. For your information, I'd like to advise that some terms used in the paper may require further study and validation.