A Study on the Erros in the Use of Korean postpositions by Vietnamese learners

Korean postpositions, along with endings, are linguistic units that foreign learners have difficulty learning and using completely. This is because postpositions and endings are the main grammatical forms in Korean. Current Korean school grammar treats postpositions as a category of words, but not endings. However, many grammarians do not raise major objections to viewing postpositions as grammatical forms with similar characteristics to endigs. For this reason, postpositions have many difficulties for Korean learners to use correctly. This study was conducted with the purpose of identifying the extent to which Vietnamese learners make errors in the Use of Korean postpositions according to their learning period or TOPIK level. The purpose of this study was based on the premise that Korean postpositions, along with endings, have strong characteristics as grammatical forms, making it difficult for Korean learners to use them correctly. The results of the one-way ANOVA between the learning period and the number of postposition errors of Vietnamese Korean learners in this study yielded significant values. However, it was confirmed that there was a ‘low positive correlation’ between the learning period and the number of postposition errors of the Vietnamese Korean learners. Because of this, it was difficult to be certain that the two were clearly related. The one-way ANOVA on the number of postposition errors by TOPIK level of Vietnamese Korean learners did not produce significant results. However, the correlation analysis between Vietnamese learners’ TOPIK level and the number of Korean postposition errors confirmed that the two had a ‘low negative correlation.’ This suggests that the higher the TOPIK level, the fewer postposition errors there are. However, the significance of this result was also difficult to confirm. These two results refute the fact that Vietnamese Korean learners did not show significant differences in postposition usage errors depending on the period of study or TOPIK level in the analysis of self-introduction content in this paper.