Research About Mistakes Made By Spanish-speaking Students On The Use Of Chinese Modal Verbs

In the studies of Chinese language, modal verbs are a very important category on the system of Chinese words, that has been always highly controversial. Linguists opinions regarding modal verbs’ definition, denomination, range of use and other characteristics have always differ. Many academics have analyzed it from different points of view and aspects. Following the popularity of "Chinese Bridge" competition in the past few years and the Confucius Institute enlargement, the development of international Chinese teaching is growing faster and faster. But we have realized that in the existing Chinese research, the results about modal verbs cannot fulfill the needs of Chinese teaching. We have noticed that Chinese-speaking people can grasp modal verbs effortlessly, but for foreign students is still a major issue, even for those with a very high level of Chinese, errors can occur while using these very few in number modal verbs. This paper will be based on previous studies about the meaning, function, position and negative forms of modal verbs in Chinese, combined with the usage of modal verbs in Spanish, to establish a comparative analysis of the semantic and grammatical differences between both languages. Having Spanish-speaking Cuban students as the main object of study, will, at the same time, conduct data collection and analysis of the errors on modal verbs usage, go further on the investigation about differences in meaning and syntax of similar modal verbs, identify the reasons that generate errors, put forward some practical distinction methods and thereby help Spanish-speaking students understand and grasp Chinese modal verbs better and faster.