A study on the Korean and Chinese pronunciation of Chinese Characters and learning Korean as a second language

Abstract

Sino-Korean words have their etymologicalroots in Chinese characters. Previous studiesshowed that the correspondent relation betweenChinese and the Korean pronunciation ofChinese characters facilitates the reading ofSino-Korean words by Chinese learners ofKorean as a second language (L2). This studyquantifies such correspondence at the syllablelevel by calculating the degree ofcorrespondence in Korean-Chinese syllables.The degree of correspondence between Koreanand Chinese syllables was examined. Resultsshow that among the 406 Chinese characterfamilies in Sino-Korean words, 22.7% have anaverage correspondent consistency lower than0.5 and 33.3% are equal to or higher than 0.5but lower than 1. Suggestions for teaching andlearning Korean as an L2 are proposed.