An Analysis On Adverbial Errors Made By Vietnamese Students In Learning Chinese

This paper mainly focuses on the adverbial errors frequently made by Vietnamese students in the process of learning Chinese.Firstly, a comparative study is made between Vietnamese and Chinese in grammatical structure and word order of adverbial. The findings are as the follow: (1) the differences in grammatical structure between the two languages are very little, except that the adverbial in Vietnamese has the same grammatical structure as adverbial, complement and even as attributive in Chinese; (2) the main difference between the two languages in word order is that adverbial in Chinese is always before the head whereas an adverbial in Vietnamese is usually after the head;Secondly, based on the materials gathered from the exercises of Vietnamese students majoring in Chinese, the adverbial errors can be classified into three types: omission, misuse and out-of-order. A detailed analysis is made on errors happening when adverbs, adjectives (or adjective phrases), verbs (or verbal phrases) and prepositional phrases function as adverbials. A further analysis is also made on the severe error that may appear especially when a mixed adverbial is used in a sentence.Lastly, the paper tries to explore the causes of these errors and also puts forward some strategies in teaching. The writer holds that the main causes of the errors are the negative transfer of their native language and the difficulties of Chinese. So in the process of teaching Vietnamese students Chinese adverbials, a teacher should make a comparative study between native language and target language and help the students understand the differences between the two languages, at the same time tries to lessen the difficulties of teaching in order to prevent the students from avoiding learning them.