Errors in Learning Chinese for speakers of different languages

Aug 12 2008

Posted by: 阿偉 in Languages

Having lived in Taiwan for some time and talked to a lot of foreigners, I’ve noticed that there are common mistakes among people who speak different native languages.

Lexical Problems:

Since Japan, Korea, and Vietnam were all influenced linguistically by China, a common error among Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese students is to use coinages derived from Chinese, but which are not strictly Chinese. For example, Japanese students refer to the subway (metro, underground) as 地下鐵 (dìxiàtiě) which is the Chinese reading of Japanese Kanji meaning (chikatetsu) “subway”. While its meaning is parsable, it’s not very well understood. A better term to use would be 捷運 (jiéyùn). Japanese speakers may sometimes use incorrect measure words. While Chinese also uses measure words, they are often different in Japanese. Thus, “a sheet of paper” is rendered by Japanese as 一枚紙 (yī méi zhǐ) instead of 一張紙 (yī zhāng zhǐ). Some Vietnamese tend to reverse the order of words, as modifiers in Vietnamese often come after the noun. Thus, a Vietnamese speaker might call a flower vase 瓶花 (píng huā) instead of 花瓶. Speakers of Western languages don’t have the advantage of cognates in their native languages and will sometimes use the wrong word entirely; this is usually because of a lack of understanding of certain connotations and cotexts. For example: 這是我同志。我們工一起。他也跟我同方。(Zhè shì wǒ tóngzhì. Wǒmen gōng zài yīqǐ. Tā yě gēn wǒ tóngfáng.) This sentence actually contains a grammatical error, but that will be discussed later. Tóngzhì means “partner” or “comrade”; here the speaker is referring to a business partner, but colloquially the word can refer to a person with which one has homosexual relations. That notion is reinforced, although unintentionally by tóngfáng. The speaker wants to say, “He is also my roommate,” but tóngfáng implies the sharing of a bed.

Grammatical Problems:

Grammatical errors seemed to be the strongest among speakers of Indo-European languages, who are unaccustomed to the idiomatic use of certain phrases, or the fact that certain words function a bit differently in Chinese, for example, being able to be used as both a verb and a noun depending on context. Wǒmen gōng zài yīqǐ follows the correct English pattern S+V, with the verb clause containing the modifier “together”. However, Chinese word order is different; the correct way to pronounce it would be placing the modifier before the verb to say 我們一起工作. Prepositions also appear in the wrong place, for example 我去公園,明天, corresponding to the word-order “I shall go to the park tomorrow”, where the correct order would be 我明天去公園.

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