A Comparative Study on the Differences Between Chinese and Korean Animal Proverbs and Their Teaching Methods

Abstract

Proverbs are condensed expressions of a nation’s language, culture, and collective experience, and animal proverbs in particular reflect culturally shared perceptions of nature, society, and human behavior. As China and Korea have long belonged to the Sinosphere and maintained close historical and cultural exchanges, Chinese and Korean animal proverbs exhibit considerable similarities in structure, rhetoric, and symbolic meaning. However, due to differences in geography, ways of life, social institutions, and psychological culture, clear divergences can also be found in their literal meanings, implied meanings, and pragmatic functions. From the perspectives of contrastive linguistics, cultural linguistics, and Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, this paper compares the similarities and differences between Chinese and Korean animal proverbs and analyzes the cultural factors underlying them. On this basis, it proposes several teaching strategies for Korean learners of Chinese, including level-based instruction, contextualized teaching, contrastive teaching, task-based teaching, and error-correction-oriented teaching. The study argues that the teaching of animal proverbs should not be limited to literal explanation; instead, semantic meaning, cultural imagery, and communicative function should be integrated so that learners can move from simple comprehension to appropriate use. Proverbs are not only important carriers of cultural education, but also effective resources for improving communicative competence and intercultural understanding in second-language teaching.