Teaching Korean Strategies Of The Chinese Characters And Words

In the field of teaching Chinese as a foreign language all along, theChinese characters and vocabulary teaching have been highly regarded, and alsothere are some academics have suggested the teaching strategy of etymology. Andin the teaching towards Korean students, many scholars have pointed out that thereare great many Chinese characters and words in Korean language. Therefore, whynot take advantage of this feature to teach the vocabulary?I studied in Korea for myinternship for a year, in my span of teaching I found that albeit Chinese and Koreanare different languages still there are many similarities lie in between, by analysingthem I worked out a set of effective methods to help the South Korean students get aquick start in learning Chinese, i.e. teaching Chinese characters based on theetymology, while teaching vocabulary in a sound-alike manner. Both teachingstrategies help the Korean students get twice the result with half the effort, thestrategies help them find the knack of those difficult characters or words, and then,a domino effect shall come to solve the difficulties one by one.The etymological teaching strategy is based on the six categories of Chinesecharacters,theyarepictographi,self-explanatory,associatecompounds,pictophonetic,mutuallyexplanatory or synonymous,phonetic loancharacters.And in which the pictophonetic characters are in the majority.In the listof The Table of the Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese there are3500characters,in which accounting80%are pictophonetic characters.Besides theself-explanatory,pictograhic and associate compounds characters are great manyalso.Although it is rather difficult to master the Chinese characters, but most of thecharacters have logical clues to help trace to their sources, these characters couldbe then regarded as the pictures, and told as logical affairs to guide studentslearning.The sound-alike teaching strategy is to help students understand and memorizeChinese vocabulary by taking advantage of the similar pronunciation in betweenChinese and Korean.Admittedly, this teaching strategy only aims to deal with the Chinese Words in Korean, so there are some limitations.I hope the exploration and discussion of the two types of teaching strategieswould be helpful towards the vocabulary teaching and character teaching for theKorean students in the future and I hope it has its reference value as well.