Solutions To Foreign Students’ Mistakes In Using Measure Words By Comparing Chinese And English Measure Words

Chinese and English belong to different language systems-while Chinese to the Sino-Tibetan language family, English to the Indo-European language family. Measure words only occur in the Sino-Tibetan language family. Chinese, as a significant branch and representative of the family, one feature of is the abundant measure words.In modern Chinese, the use of measure words is very common to see. However, English quantity expressions is quite different from Chinese.As a result, measure words have become a difficulty during the course of many foreign students’ Chinese learning. This paper aims to find out and analyze the mistakes appeared when foreign students use the Chinese measure words.In addition,it also offers some solutions and suggestions, hoping it could help the Chinese measure word teaching to foreign students.This paper is composed of five chapters.In first chapter, there will be an overview about the demand of measure words in the HSK outline and explanation of this paper’s purpose and meaning. Second chapter is the comparison of Chinese and English measure words--definition, classification and grammar characteristics.Besides, it will discuss the reasons and list out both Chinese and English expressions of some measure words.In the third chapter, it will talk about the seven types of mistakes coming from foreign students’ use of Chinese measure words and analyze why these kinds of mistakes could occur. In the fourth chapter, it not only offers some solutions and suggestions of measure words teaching in different learning phases, but also compares some homoionyms of Chinese measure words.The last chapter is the summary and the limitation of the this paper will be discuss as well as some other questions which need further study.