What is more important in learning Korean: Grammar or Vocabulary
Grammar vs Vocabulary debate is as old as the field of language education itself. There has always been a fierce debate among language researchers over what is more important in learning a foreign language- Grammar or Vocabulary? And there has come no proved conclusions yet.
Recently I have been reading a few papers and books on this issue and I found this topic very interesting. Which one of Grammar and Vocabulary is more important as far as the success or failure in Korean language learning in general and TOPIK test in particular? Keith Folse and Steve Kaufmann are some of the leading researchers who advocate the importance of vocabulary over grammar. In one of his famous articles ‘Vocabulary Myths’ Folse gives an example from his personal life to explain how important vocabulary is.
The incident happened when he was in Japan and he went to a small shop to buy some flour. He knew all the grammar patterns of Japanese to say sentences like ‘I need flour’, ‘where can I find flour’, ‘Please give me a packet of flour’ etc. but he didn’t know the exact Japanese word for flour. And all his efforts to explain the shopkeeper what he wanted proved to be useless and finally he wasn’t able to buy flour.
