The Adverbial Of Manner In Chinese And Its Corresponding Item In Romance Languages–Comparative Study And Error Analysis

The importance of the adverbial of manner is already a common sense forthe field of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, the textbooks for thestudents of Chinese, in their great majority, suggest the teaching of thisgrammatical item from the very first semester, and hereby the author liststextbooks like “Practical Chinese Reader”,“New Practical Chinese Reader”,“Modern Chinese Course: Reading&Writing”, etc.This study approaches mainly the difficulties and setbacks the speakersof Romance languages encounter in the process of learning the Chinese adverbialof manner.In its first part, this paper makes a contrastive study between theadverbial of manner in Chinese and its corresponding grammatical item in theRomance languages.This approach analyses the Chinese adverbial of manner from its threeaspects: the words through which it can be expressed, grammatical mark and theorder of words in the phrase.The phrasal item describing the manner or state of an action in Romancelanguages equals to two different items in Chinese, differentiating these two items is one of the most difficult problems of the Teaching Chinese as a ForeignLanguage.As a next level of difficulty, studying a new words’ order in the phraseor one/three mark(s) which are not present in one’s own mother tongue definitelyinfluences the accuracy of one’s spoken or written utterances.In its second part, this paper collects the natural errors found in thestudents’ compositions, it analysis the compositions of the Romance languagesrepresentatives, and tries to identify the pattern of the errors related to theadverbial of manner.This study identifies the difficulty of distinguishing between thecomplement of manner and the adverbial of manner as the main problem the studentsencounter.It is alleged that this study’s results could help teachers of Chinesebetter identify the main features of the adverbial of manner and problems thestudents encounter, and by consequence to enable them improve the their lessonplans and related exercises.