This study aims to explore North Korea’s Chinese language education for gifted students by analyzing the vocabulary in the textbook Chinese for Beginners 1, which is used by Foreign Language Institute. This paper begins with an overview of North Korea’s education system, focusing on the trends in foreign language education, particularly Chinese language, and introduces the Foreign Language Institute, which educates North Korean gifted students. Given the limited availability of North Korean materials, vocabulary in the textbook indicates the goals and status of Chinese language education in North Korea. Corpus analysis tools, such as AntConc, Wordsmith 9.0 and AntWordProfiler analyzed the vocabulary of this textbook to examine North Korea’s policies and guidelines for Chinese language education.
The results of the analysis are summarized as follows. First, the North Korean textbook has a larger vocabulary and a relatively higher difficulty level than the South Korean textbook according to the HSK vocabulary list. However, the South Korean textbook has a greater overall lexical diversity. Second, the most frequent vocabulary in North Korean textbook was mainly related to textbook structure, language functions, and Chinese character practice. The 3-gram analysis revealed that the majority of expressions were mainly related to language practice instructions. Third, key word analysis, using the South Korean textbook as a reference corpus, identified vocabulary related to textbook structure, linguistic knowledge, and language functions as key words. Although ideological education-related vocabulary was identified as key words, these appeared in only a few specific units, indicating that ideological education was not a prominent aspect. Additionally, vocabulary related to China was almost absent, except for the word 中国(appearing seven times), alongside place names and cultural references centered on North Korea. These findings suggest that North Korean Chinese language education for gifted students primarily focuses on language mastery.