A Study On The Usage Errors Of “Words” By Chinese Learners Whose Native Language Is Japanes

The word“dehua”(的话)is a very frequently used dummy word in both written and spoken modern Chinese,and it is mostly found in hypothetical compound sentences in Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages textbooks as a hypothetical marker.In fact,the linguistic function of“dehua”is much more than that.Some related studies have shown that the use of“dehua”as a topic marker is actually its more essential function.Chinese is an SVO language,which also has post-assumption markers,but prefers to use pre-assumption markers.Japanese,on the other hand,is a SOV language,which tends to use post-assumption markers.As a typical post-assumption marker,the position of “dehua” is very consistent with that of the corresponding marker in Japanese.In Japanese,conditional sentences attached to “バ” “タラ” “ナラ” and “ト” are often used to express hypothetical conditions.Therefore,such conditional sentences are consistent with the use of the Chinese word “dehua” in marking the hypothetical meaning of sentences.In addition,the topic marking function of “ナラ” in Japanese is similar to the topic marking function of “dehua”.Through the search and statistics,we found that Chinese learners whose native language was Japanese used “dehua” five times more often than those whose native language was English,and the percentage of cases in which “dehua” was used as a topic marker was higher among Chinese learners whose native language was Japanese than among those whose native language was English.The percentage of cases in which “dehua” were used as topic markers was 2.5 times higher for native Japanese than for native English speakers.This indicates that native Japanese learners use “dehua” autonomously and frequently under the influence of native language transfer.At the same time,because of the lack of learning about “dehua”,learners are prone to make mistakes.Based on the theoretical basis of comparative analysis and errors analysis,this paper compares Chinese “dehua” with Japanese “バ” “タラ” “ナラ” and “ト” in conditional sentences,and uses the similarities and differences of their usage and functions as the starting point to analyze the errors of native Japanese learners of Chinese in using “dehua” and summarize the types of errors and the reasons for them.Based on this,we propose teaching and learning suggestions for native Japanese learners of Chinese,with the aim of developing ideas for Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages of “dehua” and helping native Japanese learners of Chinese to master “dehua” better.