The Effect Of Chinese Language Teaching And Learning On Vietnamese

Language is an important carrier of culture. If the vocabulary of all languages were not relatively related it could be difficult for people from different cultural backgrounds to communicate with each other. Besides, language is an indispensable asset in the cognitive processes. Thus all languages are important mediums of cultural exchange, channels of communication and are mutually connected.Since the second century B.C, Vietnamese culture was heavily influenced by Chinese cultural artifacts. This is one of the reasons why Vietnam culture was influenced by Chinese culture, especially language. Originally the Vietnamese had no script. They borrowed the script from the Chinese. This being the case the present Vietnamese part of vocabulary is known as chinese-vietnamese sino. Thus a Vietnamese who is learning Chinese language will face many both advantages and disadvantages due to the syntactic and semantic configurations between the two languages.This paper argues that Vietnamese could easily learn Chinese language by taking advantage of the mutual intelligibility of Chinese and Vietnamese languages. This research used a comparative analysis of Chinese and Vietnamese words as a research methodology. The research discovered that though positive transfer and negative transfer of Chinese-Vietnamese Sino have an effect on the students, Vietnamese students were able to learn Chinese language. Therefore teachers should change their teaching methods and content so as to accommodate the relationship between Chinese and Vietnamese as a way of making their students quickly grasp Chinese language.