한자특성을 고려한 중국어 연구와 교육

Abstract

Chinese is a language which has Chinese characters. Chinese characters are prominently characterized by a semantic representation, and a lot of data for them have been accumulated because they have been used for thousands of years. Historically, the Korean language is closely associated with Chinese characters. Because of the necessity of the acquisition of the Chinese and of the comprehension of Chinese characters, we have to reflect these features when we research and educate the Chinese language. A character unit reflects such features. Principal contents of the 'character unit' are summarized as follows: First, a Chinese character, the basic unit of Chinese, has 'visuality' and 'psychological reality' which anyone using Chinese can recognize easily with eyes. Second, Chinese is a language based on semantics and has the sentence structure composed of a topic and a comment. These contents can be the theoretical basis of the Chinese education mentioned in Chapter 4. Although the theory of the character unit has some problems to be solved theoretically, the proper application of it to the education course can give a good studying method to learners like us who are familiar with Chinese characters. Moreover, the theory of the character unit enables us to explain clearly the part of Chinese that has been hard to explain up to now.