A comparative study of the linguistic culture of Korean and Russian from the perspective of foreign language pedagogy

Abstract

This article compares Korean and Russian with respect to various lingusitic levels, graphemic, phonetic-phonological and morphophonemic levels from the point of view of foreign language pedagogy. The comparison derives from the belief that languages are a kind of culture and individual languages include their own interpretation of a world. On the graphemic level, some semiotic characteristics are noted and discussed in terms of indexical symbol, phonetic features and syllabic representation. On the level of phonetics and phonology, this article points out different categorization functionalization of physical sounds and difference in realizational pattern in syntagmatic chains between the two languages. Finally, on the level of morphemic realization, this study compares between the inflectional mode of Russian and agglutinative mode of Korean in actualization and realization of relational concepts, and attributes realizational difference between the two langauges to the differenc in the mode. Finally, this paper emphasizes that the contrastive study presupposes independent studies of individual languages under comparison and that the independent study must be based upon the inductive method of research on empirical linguistic data, which is believed to make it possible to understand the human language s universal characteristics and various typological features.