There are a lot of synonyms in English, so many Koreans often confuse these synonyms. Among the English synonyms, most confusing words are little and tiny. The difference between the two expression is in meaning: little is “limited or below average in number or quantity or magnitude or extent”, whereas tiny is “very small.” The difference between the two expressions is also in usage. I used The Corpus of Contemporary American English and Word And Phrase (Davies, 2008-) to find out the difference in usage between the two expressions.
First of all, little is most commonly used in ‘fiction’, and the second common used in ‘spoken.’ Tiny is also most commonly used in ‘fiction’, but the second common used in ‘magazine.’ Tiny is not widely used in ‘spoken.’ Secondly, the most common phrase including little was “[a] little [noun].” Similarly, the most common phrase including tiny was “[a/the] tiny [noun].” This similarity shows that little and tiny are used to modify nouns. Lastly, little collocates with ‘bit’ in the most commonly, and the next common collocates are ‘girl, boy, thing, kid, while, man, house, guy, child, brother, town…’ It indicates that little is more often related to people, not objects. Tiny also collocates with ‘bit’ in the most commonly. However, the next common collocates are ‘room, town, hand, fraction, piece, light, island, house, village, apartment, baby…’ That is, tiny is more related to objects, not people.
Little and Tiny have some similarities and differences, so they could be confused in usage. However, if we use the corpus study, we can be less confused between two synonyms.
Reference:
Davies, Mark. (2008-) The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990-present. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.
Davies, Mark. (2008-) Word And Phrase, Available online at http://www.wordandphrase.info/frequencyList.asp.