Before the advent of “Korean studies” taken as a field of study in itself, there was neither a precise teaching curriculum nor a specific interest for hanmun teaching in European institutions proposing an introduction to Korean language and culture. Historically, the education in Classical Chinese (or Literary Sinitic) was directly linked with Classical Chinese studies taught in Sinology departments. With the rapid development of Korean studies worldwide these past few years and the growing demand for a curriculum in hanmun teaching that would be specifically targeted at students in Korean language(s) and culture(s), urgent questions have arisen about methodology, teaching methods, the languages or writing systems that should be taught (hanmun, middle korean, idu, ŏnhae, etc.), as well as the place and proportion of Korean texts that should be included within projected programmes. But these questions cannot be given quick and simple answers and must be discussed further, collectively, among teachers and specialists of Korea, since they are related to important substantive –and highly sensitive–issues that could be summed up as follows : what is “Korean” in the set expressions ‘Korean culture” or “traditional Korean culture,” and what, exactly, this Korean dimension means for us today in order to teach hanmun and traditional literary culture of pre-modern Korea ? These two main questions might sound a bit provocative at first sight, but they could be addressed more critically by the following questions: what was the Confucian curriculum that was studied and mastered by Korean literati and scholars-officials in pre-modern times, what was the level of training in hanmun that was required to succeed in civil service examinations and pursue an average career, what role Confucian Classics and, conversely, poetry, played in their basic curriculum, and, lastly, would it be possible to determine, in retrospect, the average hanmun command of an educated person in Chosŏn time ? The two presenters of this paper will try to tackle these questions by looking at texts and methods that were commonly used in traditional education, by analysing, specifically, two important Korean primers that were widely used in the Chosŏn period, the Tongmong sŏnsŭp and the Kyŏngmong yogyŏl. Analysing several features of these texts, ranging from grammatical structures, argumentative progression, intertextuality, and the underlying Confucian ideological framework, their aim is to determine whether these two texts, that are relatively short, simple, and coherent, could be fruitfully used for the teaching of hanmun in Korean studies departments, in parallel with already existing reference textbooks and grammars that have been already successfully used for the teaching of Classical Chinese in Europe for decades.