Ik-sang Eom

This article aims to present the correct pronunciations of some phonemes of Mandarin Chinese from a pedagogical perspective. It attempts to clarify the pronunciations of those consonants and vowels that Korean learners tend to make mistakes. They include f, z, c, s, zh, ch, sh, r, h, o, io, uo, ou, ao, iu, and ui. This article also emphasizes the practice of prosodic features, such as tone, stress, and rhythm in teaching Mandarin.

This paper deals with the controversial arguments about wether Chinese loan words should be written in Sino-Korean pronunciations or Chinese pronunciations in Korean writings. Since any Chinese character can be read in Sino-Korean pronunciation, previous practice was to write Chinese proper names in Sino-Korean pronunciations. This tendency, however, contradicted to the language policy of Korea, which transliterates the loan words, including personal and place names, from any other languages in

This article points out several problems of Mandarin textbooks published in Korea in the recent decades. There are hundreds of Mandarin textbooks available to all sorts of Korean learners beginning from preschoolers to adults now. Unfortunately, however, they tend to have the following problems in common: (1) a. Often compiled by non-specialists. b. Insufficient characteristics in contents and format. c. No theoretical backgrounds and framework d. Only the textbook of the beginning level

This article points out sound discrepancies between the current Koreanization System of Chinese loan words and the actual Mandarin pronunciations of the given words. Since many Koreanization systems of Mandarin have been proposed up to date, this article limits its discussion to the system proposed by the Korean government in 1986. It claims that the governmental system, which strictly followed the guidelines by the government, is good to be simple but fails to sound like Chinese personal and pl

This article claims that [nə] and [na], the native Korean words for you and I, were originally borrowed from the second and first person pronouns of Old Chinese, such as 爾 and 吾. The etymological studies in the past tended to connect these words with Altaic sources. The findings of this study, however, suggest that the past studies on these words should be re-examined for justification.

It has been ambiguous which Chinese dialects are phonetically the most similar to Sino-Korean. The conventional studies on this topic usually count the number of phonological rules that are shared between Sino-Korean and Chinese dialects. This method, however, can easily lead to a different conclusion by adopting a different counting method and/or a different set of phonological rules. Accordingly, this article points out the problems of the traditional method. Based upon Chin-chuan Cheng's quan

Karlgren (1926, 1940) proposed a hypothesis that the Go-on system of Sino-Japanese was transmitted directly from Eastern and Southeastern China in the sixth and seventh centuries while Kan-on was transmitted from Northen China through the Korean people a century later. This article, however, points out problems of Karlgren's ideas on the basis of historical studies and attempts to prove that Go-on was transmitted by the Paekche Koreans whereas Kan-on was transmitted directly from China at a late

This article points out some problems of various theories on the syllabic structure of Modern Mandarin. They include the conventional view presented in (1), Duanmu’s (2007) revised structure shown in (5-7), and Lin’s (2007) illustrated in (8, 11). The author rejects Lin’s structure because it can have two vowels as nuclei. He disputes Duanmu’s distinction between the full and weak syllables. According to Duanmu, a full syllable must have a coda while a weak syllable should not. Under his theory,

This article examines four controversial issues in classification of Chinese dialects from a quantifying approach that Chin-chuan Cheng (1982, 1991, 1996) has developed to measure affinity among Chinese dialects. Those issues in question include the following topics: (1)a. Merge or split of Gan and Kejia dialects b. Split or merge of Southern and Northern Min dialects c. The Position of the Jin dialects d. Classification of Mandarin dialects Based upon Chin-chuan Cheng’s quantifying studies on

This article points out the arbitrariness of the classifications of Chinese dialects. The criteria that have been employed to classify Chinese dialects in the past were unreliable because a different classification can be easily obtained if one uses different criteria. Accordingly, this article demonstrates how Chin-chuan Cheng's (1982, 1991, 1996) quantitative studies on the affinity among Chinese dialects can resolve the questions in hand. In addition, this study points out some problems of Ch

This article analyzes the expositions on Mandarin pronunciations in six Mandarin textbooks for Korean high school students. It examines a total of 19 terms and their explanations on initials, finals, and tones and justify their correctness. It concludes that Bak Heungsu and his colleagues’ textbook is the most reliable as far as the explanations on pronunciations are concerned. The results of this study suggests to correct those errors that are pointed out in this article when they revise the te

This article points out the problems of current Korean terms for Chinese phonetics and phonology. It opposes the use of Chinese terms directly and proposes to use more appropriate and accurate Korean terms that are acceptable in the field of general linguistics. In addition, it claims that some Chinese terms such as seyin for plosives and juansheyin for retroflexes should to be changed to baofayin and qiaosheyin respectively to depict the natures of these sounds more accurately.

This article points out tension is the most crucial obstacle to speaking a second language (L2 hereafter) based upon Eom(1989)'s experiments on the L2 learners of Intermediate Korean at Indiana University in 1988. Tension is somewhat similar to anxiety, which has been frequently reported as a key obstacle in the literature of L2 acquisition. This article presents how to reduce tension and anxiety in the production of Mandarin as an L2. In addition, it emphasizes that interaction is the most impo

The main goal of this article is to identify the most similar Chinese dialects to Sino-Korean in term of lexicon. It investigates 151 nouns out of 648 nouns listed in the Hanyu fangyan cihui, the third printing of the second edition. If a Sino-Korean noun is listed in use in any Chinese dialect in the book, it was taken as a subject for a comparison with other 19 dialects. The results of this study are summarized in data (26), which demonstrates the Changsha dialect of the Old Xiang dialects is