한국어교육을 위한 한자어 난이도 위계 설정 - 일본인 학습자를 중심으로

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to categorize Korean-Japanese synonyms into similar and different in terms of pronunciation, and to show a degree of difficulty of Sino-Korean words for beginners according to their degree of similarity. This is done to propose that phonological information may also be educationally valuable as an element of vocabulary acquisition. It is a common view that Japanese speakers learn Korean vocabulary easily because the two languages share common vocabulary originating from Chinese. However, it can also be said that it is difficult to create a medium between the target language and the learner’s native language because of the phonological differences between the two languages. Accordingly, in this study, we classify similar Chinese words into 4 levels of difficulty hierarchy according to their syllable structure, syllables, and segments, so that the Japanese learners are able to guess the meaning of Sino- Korean words based on their similarity with Japanese. As a result of the difficulty hierarchy analysis, vocabulary having high similarity both in the first and second syllable was found to be 7%, and vocabulary having only one high similarity in either the first or second syllable was found to be 31%. Finally, vocabulary having low similarity both in the first and second syllable was found to be 62%. This result means that less than one word among ten vocabularies can have its meaning predicted basing on the similarity of the first and second syllable. It can also be said that only three words were predictable based on their similarity of only one syllable in the two languages, and the remaining six or seven words were not predictable at all. This study is meaningful due to the fact that the Chinese words used in both Korean and Japanese were classified into difficulty hierarchy based on their phonological similarity. Moreover. it also provides useful information for Japanese speaking Korean language learners.