Search results for 'tag:Genders tag:Uncountable nouns' matching tags 'Genders' and 'Uncountable nouns'

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

Re: why is that?

khoff — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 02:04:22 GMT

Most native speakers (except for linguists and teachers of ESL) never think about "countable" and "uncountable" nouns. I had never heard those terms until I started tutoring ESL students (I was a volunteer; I never had formal training to teach.) A young child might make the mistake of saying "how much books" instead of "how many books," but an adult would just naturally choose the way that "sounded right" without stopping to think "Let's see -- is 'book' a countable or uncountable noun?"

I'm sure there are things in your native language, whatever it may be, that come naturally to native speakers but have to be explained by rules to foreigners who are learning your language. My guess is that grammatical gender is like this for many people. For instance, if I wanted to write something in French I would have to check a dictionary to find out if a word was masculine or feminine, while native speakers of French would just know without even thinking about it.

Re: Why one would not use articles in front of these countables?

paco2004 — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 22:20:56 GMT

Anonymous wrote:
I came upon a sentence with this phrase and have been wondering why the writer didn't place any articles in front of the ones italicized when the dictionary said they are countables. I thought countables must have articles regardless of the grammatical situations they are in. Was the writer able to get away with not following the rule because the effciency of the message took precedence over the grammar rules?
Anyone regardless of race, nationaliy, church, creed or rank is welcome.

Hello

The question why a zero article occurs for a countable noun X in "regardless of X" is very interesting. I got a similar question before in another thread where a questioner asked why a zero article occurs for X in the collocation "depending on X".

As far as I surveyed, these collocations seem to have been originally applied only in the case X can be an uncountable noun, e.g., "regardless of gender, age, and race" and "depending on size, weight, and color". It seems only in the middle of the 20th century that people began expanding this usage of zero articles to countable nouns in the way like "regardless of creed" or "depending on location". At first I got uneasy with this usage of zero articles because it seemed definitely ungrammatical to me but now I can be easy by assuming that they are ellipses of some grammatical phrases like "regardless of (what) creed (they have)" and "depending on (what) location (it is in).

paco