The Corresponding Features And Teaching And Research Of Chinese-Malay Measure Words

People of the Han ethnicity were already using a large number of measure words to measure and count units long before the word’量词’officially appeared. Over the course of time, the Chinese language has accumulated a large amount of measure words, totaling789according to statistics. Measure words are important for Han people in measuring units, and they are represented in the unique variety of cultural characteristics and thinking patterns presented in Chinese literature. Malay people also use measure words, indeed, learning measure words is a key component of learning the Malay language, even if the quantity and features are not as rich as Chinese measure words.Due to the fact that a number of measure words in Chinese and Malay are identical in form and function, learners or language users often tend to presure a one-to-one correspondence between all similarly functioning Chinese and Malay measure words during the course of using one or both languages. However, in reality there is not a perfect correspondence between all measure words in these two languages. Through a general overview of the two languages, this paper has found that, excluding measure words for general weights and measures,"one-to-one" measure words comprise a small minority, while the vast majority of measure words take the form of "one-to-many". Additionally, instances in which there is no available corresponding measure word usually occur when the intended measure word is omitted or substituted with a different kind of word, a phonomenon occuring more often in Malay."One-to many" is the correspondence that is used most often and found to be the most widespread in Malay and Chinese measure words. This form of measure word easily confuses learners who are trying to choose the proper measure word.consequently, in addition to combing through and listing the relationships of correspondence in Malay and Chinese measure words, this paper also attempt to make the relationship of measure word correspondence more clear from a semantic perspective, i.e. whether a given Chinese measure word’s actual usage corresponds with that on its Malay counterpart, and vice-versa.In term of semantic association of colors, Chinese measure words are semantically broader than Malay measure words. In additin, both languages contain measure words that process specific structural characteristics. Finally, the researcher also conducted a small-scale survey of Malay primary school students and carried put an error analysis of the students’ use of Chinese measure words in order to determine the cause and category of errors. The writer hopes this work will both offer some useful suggestions for teachers and serve as a resource for future researchers.