[quote=“Fox”]The eleven most common grammatical errors for the Chinese are:
Sentence structure
Agreement
Verd tense
Passive
Gerunds
Prepositions
Nouns: count vs non-count
Articles
Noun Clauses
Adjective Clauses
Parallelism[/quote]
You’re throwing the whole gramnmar text book at me.
Hmm,
snack - snake
‘ung’ for N instead of ‘en’
Near foolproof usage of ‘the’ when it shouldn’t be or its ommission when it should.
When counting, students go from 15 to 17. Apparently 16 does not exist. This is nearly universal among all age groups, even my junior high students make this error.
Omitting ‘will’ from future tense statements.
And why does every kid say ‘orangey’?
[quote=“naijeru”]
And why does every kid say ‘orangey’?[/quote]I’m still wondering why I’m yet to hear this because I’ve had a lot of foreign teachers tell me their students say "orangey’. Perhaps it was due to a short stint teaching in Korea or maybe my accent, vocabulary and hearing has become localised. Where the final 'e’on a word was always pronounced as a seperate syllable. What pagie, teacher?
Back to Taiwanese students.
What color is it? It’s a red.
How old are you? I’m fine, thank you.
Do you really want to know why, or is this just rhetorical?
Gah. Grocer’s apostrophe.
Do you really want to know why, or is this just rhetorical?[/quote]
Rhetorical. Oh, and another common mistake:
confusing 3rd person gender (he/she) and 3rd person subject/object (he/him)
Gah. Grocer’s apostrophe.[/quote]Thanks for pointing that mistake out. I hate seeing it in Teaching English too. Thankfully there is an edit function in this particular forum.
Gah. Grocer’s apostrophe.[/quote]
I’ve learnt something today. The day hasn’t been a waste.
My girlfriend is basically fluent in English but she still mixes up he and she as well as her plurals and singulars.
I think those are the most important mistakes. The he/she thing in America can cause people to get pretty offended in some cases and the plural/singular issue is just confusing.
what about “oliver” intead of “olive”
I teach all levels and ages and everyone of my students says “oliver” (just like Oliver Twist) and they don’t even know they are doing it when I correct them. Anyone know why? Is it based on Chinese sounds or simply an island wide bad habit.
As for the other ones:
The pronunciation of the letters “N” and “H” drives me nuts because it seems like such a fundamental thing. I’ve had my young students actually tell me that I pronounce “N” wrong when I say /en/ instead of the “correct” /uhn/ :loco:
The pronunication of the long /a/ sound (when followed by a consonant) is the biggest pronunciation problem for my students, at least at the intermediate levels and above. It really causes cofusion when they say “hat” instead of “hate” or “ap” instead of “ape.”
I always cut some slack when they commit grammar errors that don’t really cause confusion but I stress the importance of correcting errors that do bewilder the listener.
Does anyone have any tricks for correcting the He/She problem? I have some fairly advanced level students who always mess it up. Actually their consistency in picking the exact wrong one is amazing, their must be some reverse pychology at play…
Delicious.
I would like to shoot the fucker who has decreed that any acceptable foodstuff be described as delicious.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a native speaker ask if something is delicious, but here it seems to be programmed in.
And don’t even get me started on ‘be careful’. Someone needs to exlain to the idiots who write the books they study in school just how annoying it is to have someone tell you to be careful when you know what you’re doing.
[quote=“No Nutella”]what about “oliver” intead of “olive”
I teach all levels and ages and everyone of my students says “oliver” (just like Oliver Twist) and they don’t even know they are doing it when I correct them. Anyone know why? Is it based on Chinese sounds or simply an island wide bad habit.[/quote]
It’s because of the almost complete lack of final consonants in Mandarin. They are used to following consonant sounds with vowels. (Exceptions: -n, -ng)
I heard a teenager “correct” her mother when the mother pronounced “N” correctly. I stepped in and said "Your mother’s right.
I am a happy people.
Confusing people with person.
He let me angry.
Confusing let with make or made.
My friends and my families listen to my problems.
Refering to their family members as families. Or just using families because they have more than one family member.
There are have three people in my family.
I like to play computer .
It’s a computer, not a musical instrument. Play computer games or use the computer.
I like drink green tea.
Forgetting “to” before a verb.
Putting THE infront of every noun.
Letters: also G (pronounced ju, as in the Chinese word for tangerine orange).
This is strange when it could easily be ji (like chicken). In fact, the Chinese word for chicken is actually often written “G”!
And L: 'ello?
I know far too many native English speakers (especially the Brits) who use the ‘borrow me…’ construct. I hear a lot of common errors in Taiwanese English that have obviously come from a dubious ‘native speaker’ source. I feel embarassed to come from a country that considers its English dialect linguistically superior yet is losing a grip on basic grammar and spelling.
Egads! I’ve never heard such an ignorant phrase from a native speaker’s mouth!!! 
Unless they’re just being cute, or are surnamed Quayle or Bush. 
That, however, is not one of them. This is a case where the word for “lend” and “borrow” is the same in Chinese.
The native speakers aren’t confusing “lend” with “borrow”, they’re applying a non-standard reflexive pronoun contruction. It’s non-standard but it’s a common construction of some dialects of American English (I don’t know about anywhere else.) “I’m gonna get me a soda”, “I’m gonna buy me a car” where “me” is used similarly to “myself”. It works in 3rd person and 2nd person, too: “Black Bart is gonna kill him a sherrif”, “Billy Joe-Bob, you’d best go take you a bath afore Ma gits back.”
It’s sort of a regular grammar pattern in some areas. But it’s certainly NOT standard North American.
But again, the problem isn’t a poor native speaker model, it’s from interference from Chinese. That’s the case in the majority of systematic errors.
[edit]After thinking about it a bit more, I guess I have heard some native speakers say “Would you borrow me your pen”, and it has been almost exclusively British speakers. But I still stand by what I said about the problem originating from interference from Chinese rather than a poor native model.[/edit]
It is also common among other groups of people. Here are two examples:
Leen my jou tandeborsel. May I borrow your toothbrush.
Ek sal dit vir jou leen. I’ll lend it to you. Afrikaans and I suppose Dutch and Flemish too.
Khawundiboleke icell phone yakho. Please lend me your cell phone?
Kulungile, ungayiboleka. OK, you may borrow it. Xhosa and Zulu, Swazi and Ndebele too, methinks.
“Teach” and “learn” are also a problem to some people, but not as tricky as “borrow” and “lend”.
[quote=“naijeru”]
And why does every kid say ‘orangey’?[/quote]
Because their stupid* parents and / or Chinese English teacher beats the living shit out of them if they say “orange”.
I’ve actually seen it with my own eyes. At one school where I worked there was a “School 20 MPH MAX” sign hung outside. When leaving one night a woman and her son were standing there; she was making him say the letters.
“Ess, see, eightch…”
“EIGHTCH-EE, EIGHTCH-EE!!!” screached his mother who then belted him upside the head.
Some of my pet peeves include:
un (N)
um (M)
ello (L)
ekusay (X)
Zoidberg: “Spell ‘Hello’”
Student: “eightch-ee, e, ello, ello, o”
Zoidberg writes on the whiteboard exactly what the kid has said: “heeloloo”
But for me the all-time biggest piss off of all (guaranteed to have me jumping on the little twerp’s head) is:
“QUICK - A - LEE!”
*mod note: verbiage foulmouthious removed
