ESL Linguistics Discussion Forum

Re: Mistakes made by Chinese Learners

Anonymous — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 00:37:32 GMT

Shannon-

The difficulty with "he" and "she" in Chinese is the same word is used for both (and it). The word in Mandarin is ta1. The only differentiation is the written character for he or she uses either the male or female radical.

English speakers do not usually stress the "r" sound when it is enclosed in a word like heart. If you listen to how you actually say it, the "r" seems to hold in the back of the throat. It is difficult to distiguish this sound. While Chinese does have an "r" like sound, it isn't enunciated the way we enunciate it.

Hope that helps-

Tara

Re: Mistakes made by Chinese Learners

nona the brit — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 06:40:22 GMT

You also want the word 'comprehension' not 'comprehensiveness'.

Re: Mistakes made by Chinese Learners

Clive — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 02:36:17 GMT

Hi,

Switching between 'he' & 'she' - Does anyone know why this is?

I've been told that these distinct pronouns are not used in Mandarin. In other words, they don't differentiate, or perhaps they do it in a quite different way.

Best wishes, Clive

Re: Mistakes made by Chinese Learners

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:03:06 GMT

Sorry that should have been l not !!

Mistakes made by Chinese Learners

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:30:26 GMT

Hi everyone

I just wondered if anyone could help - I have to write a profile of a chinese learner of English (completely made up). In it I must put any difficulties that the learner has in learning English as an L2. I have got so far:

Intonation transfer from L1 may cause them to be perceived as rude/inconsiderate, more serious transfer may affect comprehensiveness.
No inflections in L1 - tenses difficult to learn in L2 as L1 has no true tenses and concept of time is expressed by adverbs/implicit or contextual assumptions.
Difficulty distinguishing [r] & - Does anyone know why this is as I can't find a reason?!!
Prepositions such as 'on', 'in' & 'at' have one chinese translation in many contexts, 'zai' - may be confused resulting in phrases such as 'on Taiwan' instead of 'in Taiwan'.
Use of awkward gerunds e.g. 'no noising', excessive use of verbs ending in 'ing' e.g. 'do not climbing', confusion of 'ed' & 'ing' verbs e.g. 'i am bored' vs 'i am boring' --- all of these errors occur because verbs are not conjugated in chinese, for tense or pronoun.
No equivalent word for 'the' so may be used excessively when not needed e.g. 'The China' or missed out when needed. May also be confused with 'a'/'an'.
Confusion over countable and uncountable nouns, use of 'how much?' vs 'how many?' - leads to phrases such as 'I want a soup' & 'a lot of shoe'. This is due to there not being plurals in chinese - no inflections.

Switching between 'he' & 'she' - Does anyone know why this is?

If anyone can think of anymore it would be greatly appreciated or if anyone knows the answers to my questions about gender switching and distinguishing [r] & this would also help a lot!!

Thank you in advance.

Shannon