The Comparison Between "Zai" And "at" And The Analysis Between "Zai" And "at" Biased Errors

"At" has eight semantic meaning from the cognitive linguistics,as indicating a point in space,time,state,directions,reason,aspect,distance,ways; meanwhile,"zai" has nine semantic meaning when it used as a verb,an adverb or a preposition, as indicating existing,position,depending on,proceed,time,place,scope,condition,actor.The existence of a number of different items including semantic and grammar usage of "zai" and "at" makes trouble to European and American students in learning "zai" and Chinese students in learning "at".This paper started at the comparison in semantic meaning and grammatical function and presence and absence of "zai" and "at".The main part of this paper was the analysis between "zai" and "at" biased errors. The "at" biased error of Chinese students was obtained through the survey form four high schools and middle schools, The "zai" biased errors of European and American students were based on written work of students, students speaking practice, as well as the written expression of dynamic library of Corpus HSK.Article analyzed the two biased errors. First, from two aspects----semantic meaning and grammatical function, the paper analyzed the errors to identify the reasons for the formation of the errors; and then from the types and causes of the errors, the paper summarized the similarities and differences between two kinds of biased errors. At last the paper found that the two biased errors have the same point:Chinese and English sentence structure characteristics are the same reason to errors, especially, the sentence order. The difference between the two biased errors is mainly reflected in:a special frame of Chinese sentence and the semantic diversity of English prepositional phrase "at". Finally, the paper tried to find the ways to avoid the two biased errors from the aspects of teachers, textbooks, and the target language itself. The answer is that from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, finding the basic semantics of a word, named source domain, and then finding out the relationship between the different meanings, named family resemblance, are better to understand and grasp a word. That will make language learning easier for learners. And that views mentioned above may be helpful to language teaching.