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Problem: 他, 她, 它 all carry the same pronunciation (ta1).
Implication: Students are likely to say “she” when they mean “he” or vice-versa.
My Suggested Solution: This seems to be nearly incurable for some students, but others get better with practice and learn to catch their own mistakes. -
Problem: Chinese sentences can be short, limited to one word answers.
Implication: Gives the impression that learners are lazy when they try to translate their thoughts into English. How do you feel? “So happy.” What do you like? “Dog.”
My Suggested Solution: Drilling long-form sentences is the only way, but in a classroom environment you can always expect short answers to be shouted out first. -
Problem: Chinese lacks articles “a” and “the”.
Implication: Students often confuse when to use the different articles.
My Suggested Solution: This can be avoided by the teacher having a very conscious awareness of exactly how to use the articles, and can give impromptu mini-lessons when students confuse them. -
Problem: Chinese tenses are non-existent and depend on single particles attached to verbs.
Implication: The tenses in English will always be confused and misused.
My Suggested Solution: Actually, it’s worth noting that this is rarely a problem when trying to understand a student, and they seem able to understand the tenses fine (with practice). The best way to improve this is by writing drills, in my experience, and then eventually when writing correctly becomes second nature, speaking will follow. Speaking drills are less physical and produce invisible results, so they are ineffectual by themselves with something so complicated as this. -
Problem: Plural forms are ambiguous in Chinese, unless 們 is attached.
Implication: The major implication, in my opinion, comes in students’ tendencies to treat the “s” at the end of a word, such as “giraffes” or “pigs” as silent.
My Suggested Solution: This seems to get better with practice, but it needs to be corrected consistently. If you worry about interrupting and embarrassing students in front of their peers, then remind them before they start reading. -
Problem: 看 is a very versatile word in Chinese, which can mean read, see, look, watch, or any number of other meanings.
Implication: You will often get sentences like “I am seeing a book” or “I am looking TV”. These verbs get screwed up quite frequently among young learners.
My Suggested Solution: Actually, I’m still working on a good solution for this one. Of course, I correct and do my best to explain the difference whenever this comes up, but I think I need to make a poster or something… -
Problem: 有 = have, but also “there is/are”
Implication: The concept here is that 有 is frequently translated as “have” in beginners’ textbooks, so kids will say “Have a boat in the water.” or “There have a boat…”
My Suggested Solution: It’s best to fix this as early as possible. If you’re teaching young learners, and you’re teaching them “have”, you’d better teacher there is/there are right away. I’ve managed to dodge this bullet with a couple of classes but, not knowing to anticipate this, I failed my first two YL classes and it’s been really hard for them to shake the habit. -
Problem: Consonant clusters in Chinese have no final vowels.
Implication: Teachers often hear words like this: “book-uh” instead of “book”, “ye-si” (pronounced like pinyin) instead of “yes”, and so on.
My Suggested Solution: Teaching by example is effective over time. In my experience, many children glorify this behavior as funny or cute among their peers. Maturity and experience with the English language gets rid of this for the most part, though you may notice it even among your friends from time to time. Once I heard my girlfriend say “si-da-di” instead of “study”. If you want to correct it in class, the class should be small, and you should be consistent (my opinion). Being inconsistent will just make it worse. If the class is too large then you have too many kids making the mistake too many times to possibly manage on a case by case basis. Making phonics posters may help, and dedicating time to practicing problem words is always a good idea. -
Problem: “be-verbs” are not as commonly used in Chinese. “我很快樂” = “I am very happy” in meaning, but there is no be-verb present in the Chinese.
Implication: Lots of confusion about be-verbs, such as: how and when to use them, which ones to use, etc. “I going to the park” is a common mistake, as well as “You is bad.”
My Suggested Solution: I’ve seen this improve gradually, though not without some errors, over the course of a year of teaching the same kids. Drilling them helps a lot in the short term, but if you don’t keep the drills up at least from time to time, it’s ineffective in the long-term. This is one area where writing drills will not help much at all. When writing, kids know when to use the proper forms of be-verbs more often than not, but when speaking, there’s no time for them to think. It has to become second-nature, and the best way for my classes has been drilling. -
Problem: In Chinese, the words “sore” and “sour” happen to be the exact same word in Chinese.
Implication: This leads to a lot of confusion between the two, similar to other cases like “ticklish” and “itchy”, which both are “yang”. -
Problem: Many words in Chinese are more flexible and versatile than their English counterparts, able to act as noun, adj, adv, etc.
Implication: “My foot is so hurt!” This confusion comes from a common translation error in “hurt” rather than with the word “so”, however, because “teng” in Chinese is a lot more flexible than “hurt”, its English equivalent. This also means Taiwanese are likely to forget when to use “ly” at the end of the word, or alter it in other ways.
Please note that my suggested solutions are not necessarily the only or the best way for any given teacher to approach the problem. As others have pointed out, there are many approaches, and it is wrong to suggest one is better than the other in any and every situation or classroom. Please share your own experiences, problems, and solutions below.
But why not just write your opinions? There are some other posters who might have missed this thread because they’re out doing weekend stuff. Maybe they’ll add something later today or on Monday. Maybe ironlady will add some more, or Joesox, or tomthorne, or some of the others. And of course, that doesn’t mean you guys should stop.