The Foreign Learners’ Acquisition Of Chinese Prepositions And Their Errors Analysis

It is difficult for foreign students to learn Chinese prepositions in the process oflearning Chinese grammar. First of all, in a strict sense, the Chinese grammar ischaracterized by a dearth of morphological changes, which gives prepositions a pivotalrole to play in the Chinese language. Prepositions have no content meaning, but abstractgrammatical meaning with flexible usage, and one preposition always has multiplegrammatical meanings, so it is hard to learn. Secondly, the Chinese researchers andteachers’ inadequate knowledge of the complicated grammatical functions of theChinese prepositions, as well as the inappropriate teaching methodologies may lead tothe foreign students’ making of errors in using Chinese prepositions. Thirdly, due to thedifferent language background and the different grammatical structures between theirmother tongues and the Chinese language, foreign learners often find the learning taskeven harder. For example, Japanese is an adherent language, Chinese is a typicalisolated language, and English is an inflected language. The different grammaticalsystems of these three languages make it very hard for the foreign learners of Chinese tocope with especially in the learning of Chinese prepositions.Based on the Inter-language Theory, this study adopts the method of contrastiveanalysis and error analysis to analyze the data collected from the Modern ChineseGeneral Balanced Corpus and the HSK (Chinese Proficiency Test) DynamicComposition Corpus. The present study aims to analyze the frequencies in the use ofChinese prepositions by English and Japanese students, in contrast with the Chinesenative speakers’ data. Moreover, the study also focuses on the prepositional errors madeby the Chinese learners of different mother tongues—Russian, French, and English (ofthe same Indo-European family) in particular, in their acquisition process of Chineseprepositions.The major findings are as follows:a) Compared with Chinese native speakers, English students are much more likelyto use prepositions. The total frequency in the use of Chinese prepositions by Englishstudents is significantly higher than that of Japanese students. The frequencies betweenJapanese students and Chinese native speakers are not significantly different.b) Although in the same Indo-European language family, there are still somedifferences in the use of certain prepositions among learners with different language background, namely English, Russian, and French. However, their overall level ofChinese preposition acquisition for the learners of these three groups tend to be veryclose. The frequency order of prepositions from high to low is Russian, French, andEnglish. On the part of the occurrence rate of errors, there are slight differences amongdifferent mother tongues. For the types of errors made by the three groups, all the threekinds of problems are found—structural problems, usage problems, and expressingproblems. The feature of randomness and instability is also found when Indo-Europeanstudents use Chinese prepositions.