Analyzing The Misuse Of “差点儿” And “差点儿没” Among Thai Students & Advice On Teaching Proper Usage

This paper studies the difficulties encountered by the students in Thailand when they learned "cha dian" and "cha dian mei" (which correspond "almost" and "almost not" respectively in English), I have designed a questionnaire of "cha dian" and "cha dian mei" for the students from grade one to grade four in the department of Chinese at Kasetsart University to investigate, and then, analysis the causes of their learning difficulties. As one of the reasons of their learning difficulties was lack of certain negative syntax in Thai language, thus, this paper also carries on a comparative study of grammar between the Thai and Chinese sentence structure. In addition, this paper employs "hope", a theory brought up by Mr. Zhu Dexi in Chinese as a second language text books, to analyze these two phrases. One interesting point is that "cha dian mei" of the negative adverb "mei"(not) sometimes does not express negative meanings. For instance, the meaning of "cha dian mei si" (which can be literally translated as "almost not dead") and "cha dian si" (almost dead) is similar, but the phrase "cha dian kao shang" (almost accepted by a university) and "cha dian mei kao shang" (almost not accepted by a university) have opposite meanings. Since they cannot distinguish the usage between the two phrases clearly, students who are native to Thai language may face difficulties were they about to translate the above sentences. The last part of this paper gives suggestions for this issue in teaching and learning.