This study investigates differences in Chinese receptive vocabulary size and perceived lexical difficulty among three groups of Korean university students: Chinese majors, liberal arts students studying Chinese, and students with no formal exposure to Chinese. A total of 156 participants completed a 47-item Vocabulary Level Test (VLT) based on HSK levels 1–5. Data were analyzed using one-way ANOVA and Item Response Theory (IRT). The results revealed significant group differences: Chinese majors demonstrated the highest lexical competence, followed by liberal arts students and then non-learners. Notably, non-learners achieved a mean accuracy rate of 38.30%, likely due to the influence of Sino-Korean cognates. IRT analysis further indicated that Chinese majors perceived the items as relatively “easy,” liberal arts students as “difficult,” and non-learners as “very difficult.” These findings underscore the critical role of linguistic and cultural familiarity—particularly knowledge of Chinese characters—in facilitating vocabulary comprehension. The study advocates for differentiated instructional strategies tailored to learners’ backgrounds and calls for future research involving students from non-Sinographic language backgrounds to enhance the generalizability of the findings.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the receptive vocabulary size of Korean university students in Chinese. The study was conducted at the end of the 2022 fall semester and focused on the receptive aspect of vocabulary knowledge, specifically on ‘reading.’ The participants were divided into three groups: 1st year, 2nd year, and 3rd-4th year students, and a vocabulary assessment was carried out. The assessment vocabulary consisted of 80 items extracted from the HSK (2015) test. As a result, the accuracy rates were 60.07% for the 1st year, 76.98% for the 2nd year, and 80.77% for the 3rd-4th year. After conducting one-way ANOVA and post hoc tests, there were statistically significant differences in scores between the 1st year group and both the 2nd year and 3rd-4th year groups. However, there was no statistically significant difference between the 2nd year and 3rd-4th year groups. When comparing the accuracy rates to the cumulative vocabulary of 5,000 words in the HSK level 6, it showed that the 1st year group knew approximately 3,103.50 words, the 2nd year group knew 3,849.00 words, and the 3rd-4th year group knew 4,038.5 words.