A proverb, this account says, is built from an easy metaphor and a compact form, so it carries meaning well. It also holds sharp satire and a lesson, which helps a listener understand and feel with the speaker, and that is why proverbs are widely used in ordinary talk. Because they contain Korean ways of thinking and acting, a foreign learner can meet the culture through them, and they help the communicative ability that Korean education as a foreign language aims at.

A proverb is an idiom that puts a fact in figurative form, and it holds a truth and a lesson that native speakers take as generally shared, so it is essential if a learner is to understand how Korean speakers see the world. For Koreans themselves, using proverbs is part of speaking the language effectively, and a learner who wants to put a thought clearly needs to study them. The writer sets out to choose proverbs for the classroom and to discuss how they might be taught to intermediate learners.

Those learners often make errors of meaning, of form, and of grammar, so teaching should move in the direction of correcting them. First the meaning must be learned. Ways of presenting it include a picture, a gloss, and a context. Pictures and context can help in part, but the usual method is a gloss, and a gloss is exacting: it has to say enough, accurately, in a short stretch of language. The example is the proverb often given in English as “a word without feet travels a thousand ri.” In its basic sense, talk and rumor spread quickly.

It also carries the implied lesson that one should be careful with words, and both should be given together. In that saying, the “word” is not an animal’s footed body but speech passed between people, and “a thousand ri” means that it travels widely, so the figurative work of the words should be pointed out as well, and the gloss should fit the proverb’s form. Pictures and audiovisual material can raise interest and make concrete vocabulary easier, but a word such as “a thousand ri,” rarely met in daily life, can itself get in the way.

Context means letting the proverb appear in a dialogue or a passage where it would naturally be used, so that a learner can grasp the sense more directly. Context alone, though, makes it easy to take the implied lesson as the basic sense, so it is better not to rely on it by itself. A gloss, a picture, and a context work best together. Understanding a proverb and being able to say or write it are not the same thing; even if a learner recognizes the right proverb for a situation, it is hard to produce without learning the set form.

The form is hard because the wording can be demanding and the whole string is long to memorize, so the writer suggests learning the words that make it up first, then memorizing the proverb as a whole. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.