In spite of some semantic and phonological similarities between the vocabulary of Korean and Chinese, it has been generally accepted that the two languages are significantly different from each other in terms of grammatical, particularly typological features. For this reason, only quite a few previous studies have focused on similarities between the grammars of the two languages.
A number of studies on Korean writing errors, however, have showed that Chinese L1 of Korean language learners made grammatical errors significantly less frequently than the English L1 learners. According to previous studies conducted with various L1 groups, the error rate of Chinese L1 learners on the Korean tenses was relatively lower than that of English L1 learners. This is quite an unexpected finding, in the consideration of the fact that the past tense is realized by verbal conjugations mostly with inflectional affix in English, which is exactly the same with Korean, whereas time references can be expressed only through time phrases or adverbials (i.e. non-grammatical items) in Chinese.
This study aims to examine whether Chinese L1 Korean language learners are able to easily acquire a good knowledge of Korean grammar, especially the past tense marker ''-ess/ass-'', and to find out the reason behind it if they really are. For such a purpose, an extensive analysis was conducted with Korean writings collected well over ten years (i.e. from 2002 to 2014) from Hong Kong students, most of whom had Cantonese (i.e. a dialect of Chinese) as L1.
The analysis results showed that Hong Kong students of every level (i.e. elementary, intermediate and advanced Korean) made significantly less errors on the tense markers (''-ess/ass-'' and ''-kess-'') and the word order, compared to other grammatical items, such as connective endings and case markers. This is generally consistent with the results of previous error-analysis works on Korean grammatical items for Chinese L1 Korean learners, especially done by Lee(2005).
It is known that the Korean past tense marker ''-ess/ass-'' can be also used as an aspect marker to describe an action that has been completed or to express something as a lasting result of a past action. In these particular cases, the Korean past tense marker is quite similar to the Chinese particle ''le[了]'' which can be used both as an aspect marker and an ending modal particle.
In addition to that, it is worth mentioning that there are two syntactic similarities between Korean and Chinese. Firstly. the ending modal particles (including ''le'') are being used in Chinese in a syntactically similar manner to the verbal conjugations with pre-final and final endings in Korean. Secondly, the position of time adverbials in Korean sentences is exactly the same with that of Chinese sentences. It is believed that these two syntactic similarities also help Chinese L1 learners be easily able to acquire the grammatical features of the Korean past tense marker.
In this study, it was also demonstrated that the word order is quite similar each other in the two languages, except for the position of objects in sentences (i.e. [SOV] vs. [SVO]). The similarity of the word order also supports the fact that Chinese L1 learners have less difficulties learning the word order of Korean sentences.
It has been well accepted that Chinese L1 English learners are not good at the past tense compared to other L1 groups including the Japanese L1. This was explained by the fact that Chinese has no verbal conjugations for tense, unlike other major languages. From this work, however, it was shown that syntactic similarities are no less important than morphological similarities when acquiring unfamiliar grammatical features of foreign languages, like past tense for Chinese L1 learners.
For a long time, Korea and China has carried out personal and cultural exchanges. Therefore, it is reasonable to say that the horizontal (i.e. cultural) transmission of the two languages must have occurred in a considerable level. In this sense, it is natural that there exist some syntactic similarities between the two languages. The finding of this study is useful and important for those who teach the Korean language to Chinese L1 learners. It is because focusing on similarities with the target language will be far more efficient, rather than focusing on the differences, for a teacher to encourage his or her students to learn the language.