Chinese And Japanese To Negative Words Compared

Modern Chinese and modern Japanese are two different languages in several ways. Chinese is part of isolated language while Japanese is part of agglutinative language; the word order of Chinese is"S+V+O"while that of Japanese is"S+O+V". Although there are so many differences between these two languages as above, they both have the negative concept and negative Category, which are the opposite of the positive concept and positive category. In Chinese, the negative words are the important constituent parts of the negative form, among which"bu"and"mei(you)"are the two most important and most commonly used members. Because of their similarity in meaning and usage, it becomes a difficult point in Chinese teaching to foreigners to distinguish one from the other. By comparing"bu"and"mei(you)"(Chinese) with"nai","nakatta","teinai"(Japanese),this paper analyzes the corresponding relations existing in them, and attempt to find out the inherent rules when these words are used with predicate verbs or predicate adjectives. On the basis of the comparison as above, the paper makes the analysis on the errors about the usage of"bu"and"me(iyou)"made by the Japanese students at the primary level of Chinese learning, and gives the detailed explanation to the cause of these errors from the theoretical angle. At the end, the paper puts forward some feasible suggestion on how to teach"bu"and"mei(you)"to the Japanese students at this level, based on all the comparison of the Chinese and Japanese negative words and the error analysis presented in the chapters ahead.