KJCKorea
Journal Central

ChatGPT has deeply integrated into our daily lives and education, and this kind of AI will continue to evolve. While some universities utilize ChatGPT in education, concerns about information errors and limitations remain. As with the advent of machine translators, its use is inevitable and cannot be fully restricted. Therefore, the role of educators is to help students understand its characteristics, review processes and outputs, and encourage independent thinking and judgment. When new tools emerge, we must continually explore how to use them effectively within the relevant fields. This study examines the potential and limitations of using ChatGPT as an auxiliary tool for foreign language learning through practical application in dialogue tasks. For learners who lack immediate access to native speakers, ChatGPT offers a secondary method for practicing and experiencing conversations, providing some positive utility. Although this research is based on observations of a small group of participants and cannot be fully generalized, it offers insights into the specific characteristics of ChatGPT in language learning. Additionally, it explores learners’ responses and psychological changes in learning, proposing considerations for other educational contexts. To effectively use ChatGPT in language learning, it is crucial to set the learner’s proficiency level, define specific conversational contexts, and specify the desired response length. Many studies also emphasize the need to educate learners on prompt input methods. However, beyond basic settings, allowing students to explore and develop questioning skills on their own could be more effective in the long run. Encouraging learners to think independently and formulate better questions can itself be a valuable learning process. Future research should continue to explore strategies for using ChatGPT in language education across diverse learner groups.

This study critically examines various approaches to the emergence of Chinese writing, from traditional accounts to modern theories. The traditional approach traces the origin of Chinese characters back to signs on pottery and artifacts that predate the oracle bone inscriptions excavated in Anyang, based on morphological similarities. However, this approach fails to clarify the functions of those signs and their transition into characters. Modern theories include, on the one hand, the idea that the emergence of Chinese writing was a short-term invention, and on the other, the view that it resulted from gradual cultural evolution. Both hypotheses contain elements that go beyond what our current archaeological evidence can explain. As an alternative, I propose an evolutionary explanation for the formation and development of characters, relying solely on the oracle bone inscriptions from Anyang, without resorting to earlier archaeological materials.

In this paper, we examined the synesthetic expression aspect of ‘苦(Bitter)’ series words from the perspective of cognitive linguistics based on the theory of conceptual blending theory. We also analyzed corpus data to build a conceptual integrated network of ‘苦(Bitter)’ series words. In ‘苦 (Bitter)’ series words, the unpleasantness of bitter taste is more dominant, so tasting bad or unsatisfactoriness is expressed as bitter, and the meaning is extended to the areas of ‘touch, hearing, sight, and smell’ synesthetically. The words can express physical pain, displeasure, suffering, hardship, and earnestness experienced in a poor environment or difficult situation. The morpheme combined with ‘苦(Bitter)’ plays an important role in the process of meaning extension, and the grammaticalization of ‘苦(Bitter)’ serves as an important mechanism for conceptual metaphor, metonymy, and conceptual blending. It was found that the meaning extension of ‘苦(Bitter)’ follows the directions of animate>inanimate, concreteness>abstractness, physical>social>psychological, and generality>analogy> tolerance according to the principles of human cognition. ‘苦(Bitter)’ series words are used more in negative situations than in positive expressions.