Search results for 'tag:Gerunds tag:Intonations' matching tags 'Gerunds' and 'Intonations'

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: only...

CalifJim — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 19:14:32 GMT

I was imagining them as written. I was imagining all of them without any particular voice stress. In spoken form, if you stress the word that goes with only, you can put the only just about anywhere. I think the default is to feel the stress on the last element of the sentence, however, so even without any stress, I think most people will feel that that last element is the one that goes with only.

But with certain verbs that take infinitives or gerunds as complements ...

I only promised to bring the steaks.

It's ambiguous -- unless you use intonation.

In writing you might have to provide the contrasting phases to make it clear:

I only promised to bring the steaks -- not the potato salad.
I only promised to bring the steaks -- not to cook them.

CJ

Re: Gerund/participle

just the truth — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 13:31:16 GMT

1.I have a fishing rod.

2.I read an interesting book.

Is {in (1)} fishing a gerund or a participle in 1? OR "In 1, is fishing a ..."

JTT: The placement of 'in 1' is unnatural, Hanuman.

In (2), interesting is a participle. Am I right?

Then why ISN'T "fishing" in (1) [is not] a participle.

++++++++++++++++++++++

Paco has covered this well. I'll just add a few comments.

'fishing rod' is a compound noun. It's the name of an item. As Paco noted new compound words are often hyphenated but the hyphen is dropped as the word becomes notable on its own.

These types of compounds abound in English; paring knife, carving knife, roasting pan, rolling pin, roasting rack, shopping cart, coloring book, parking garage, parking meter, etc.

The intonation for compound nouns is different than that of phrases where the ____ing is an actual participle.

darkroom (for photography) is different from "a dark room", one without lights.

dark horse (an unknown person who surprises everyone with their talent) is different from "a dark horse", a horse that is dark.

dark glasses (sunglasses) are different from "dark glasses", perhaps colored drinking glasses or eyeglasses with dark frames