Main Difficulties for Hungarian-learning Korean Students and Effective Hungarian Teaching Methods

Abstract

Indeed, views vary from scholar to scholar, but according to a generally accepted theory, Korean and Hungarian are known to belong to the Altaic and Finn-Ugor language families, respectively. Originating in the Ural and Altaic Mountains, the two languages are close to each other in terms of language family as well as language type (agglutinative language). Thanks to these similarities, Korean students are seen to learn Hungarian easily, compared to other Middle Eastern European languages, i.e. Slavic and Romance languages. In spite of such advantage, there is a typical interlanguage Korean students often use ungrammatically, when learning Hungarian. This paper aims to look into the typical interlanguage and determine the reasons for its birth on the basis of the data I have accumulated, while teaching Korean students Hungarian for 12 years and the survey for 136 Korean students (34: freshman) at the Department of Hungarian Language of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. The representative interlanguage forms are most found in phonetics / phonology, morphology and syntax. In the area of phonetics / phonology, Korean students have difficulty in clearly distinguishing between long and short vowels, e.g. a-á, e-é, i-í, o-ó, ö-ő, u-ú, ü-ű, and some consonants, i.e. d, dz, dzs, gyé, zé, zsé. In addition, few Korean students correctly tell vowel i from consonant j. In the area of morphology, the conjugation by person causes the most serious trouble to Korean students. Korean does not conjugate verbs by person instead of omitting subjects, whereas Hungarian conjugates verbs by person instead of often omitting subjects. The postpositions widely used in Hungarian are also headaches to Korean students. In the area of syntax, an interlanguage often appears in word order. Korean has a fixed word order, whereas Hungarian gives a speaker a freedom to change a word order according to his/her intention. In conclusion, I show effective teaching methods, which I am using on these difficulties to Korean students learning Hungarian.