Cnalysis Of Primary Korean Learners’ Usage Of Chinese Characters And Errors

This paper collects and collates 1,799 compositions of students of Grade 2009-2012 in Korean Language Department, Yanbian University throughout their freshman year’s exams as the research materials. These materials contain altogether 780,000 characters. Through statistical analysis, this paper examines primary Korean learners’ usage of Chinese characters, analyzes errors of Chinese characters and clarifies causes of these errors.In the first part, this paper investigates the error analysis theory as the theoretical basis of this paper. "Error analysis" refers to the systematical analysis and research of errors made by learner at different levels of the second language acquisition process such as pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, discourse and pragmatics. The analysis process includes gathering data, classifying errors, explaining causes of errors, finding rules of errors and evaluating the severity of errors, etc. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the Inter-Language Theory began to be introduced into researches and many achievements have been made. However, most of these achievements are based on qualitative analysis with a lack of large corpus as the data support, and these achievements are not systematic, so it is difficult to accurately reflect the entire and true condition of the complex Korean inter-language. Thus, researches of errors in the acquisition of Korean are still not very comprehensive.In the second part, through collating materials, this paper gets the probability of errors and that of accurate use of Chinese characters. Starting from zero and with the increase of learning time, there are more and more vocabulary errors in the learning of Korean. Through gathering and summarizing data, this paper analyzes types of vocabulary errors at the primary stage as well as characteristics of these errors, and the finds causes of these errors. Chinese characters, accounting for more than 60% of the entire Korean vocabulary, are advantages for Chinese students in learning Korean, but also an obstacle. According to statistics, among the Chinese characters that Korean learners at the primary stage should accurately use, homographs and synonyms are the most frequently used, and this phenomenon can be seen as positive impact of mother tongue.In the third part, according to causes of Chinese character errors, this paper divides errors into three categories, namely errors caused by mother tongue transfer, errors caused by the learning of target language, and errors due to communication strategies. Statistics show that errors caused by the learning of target language occupy the most proportion because learners are at the primary stage, so they do not have enough vocabulary with serious errors in pronunciation and spelling. Meanwhile, as they do not have a deep understanding of the difference between Chinese characters in Korean and Chinese, they make mistakes in using Chinese characters.This paper only analyzes the usage of Chinese characters with Chinese learners as the object, which is necessary for future researches of vocabulary learning strategies and educational programs. Deficiencies in this aspect will become the research object, which will be further discussed in later learning.