Problems Chinese speakers have learning English

The largest populated country in the world is China, coming to 1,347,350,000 people by the end of 2011. There is an increasing amount of Chinese students studying overseas and the most frequent destinations are English-speaking countries. Chinese learners of English tend to all come across the same difficulties when learning one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.

There are many parts of English language that may appear confusing to Chinese learners because of the vast difference between the two languages, too many parts in fact, so for the purpose of this blog post, I'll be narrowing down to orthography, grammar, and the use of intonation.  

Firstly, there is no alphabet in the Chinese language; instead they use the logographic system so they may have difficulties in learning English spelling patterns. Some common mistakes made in orthography mentioned in Learner English (2001) include the failure to apply standard spelling conventions, for instance dinner spelt diner. They may also have problems arising from the lack of hard and fast spelling rules in English, e.g. answer spelt anser.

Individual words may take more time to identify as they take up more space than Chinese characters therefore learners are not used to taking in so much text at a time. Thus, they tend to have slower reading speeds at first until their minds adjust to absorbing the words quicker.

Secondly, a brief look at grammar for Chinese learners. It is advisable not to regard anything as a 'basic' point which students 'ought to know' as the whole territory of English grammar will be unfamiliar to learners. English grammar is unsurprisingly very diverse compared to Chinese grammar. As explained by A Guide to Learning English, Chinese is an uninflected language and conveys meaning through word order, adverbials and the mutual understanding that the topic of conversation is context-bound. On the other hand, in English, auxiliaries are used and by verb inflections to convey tense/timing. As the Chinese language does not require verb tenses to communicate the concept of time, this may become a problem when learners translate from Chinese to English. For instance, they may miss out auxiliaries in sentences: How much you pay for your car?

Lastly, a major problem that may hold back speakers from successfully learning English is the fact that Chinese uses tones to differentiate words, in contrast, English uses intonation and different pitches for different types of grammar and for the expression of various emotions. For example, in Mandarin, 'ke' spoken in second tone means 'to drink' while 'ke' spoken in fourth tone means 'lesson'. Because of this, Chinese speakers' intonation will often improperly change when speaking English which may cause confusion from an English listener.

You may feel like some aspects such as grammar in the English language are simply common sense, but depending on what your first language is, it can be extremely difficult to master English and this post has barely touched the surface of the complications that can arise during learning. That is not to say that it's impossible, as many have successfully grasped it, but this post explains a few difficulties you should expect should you teach English to a Chinese speaker. 

Winny Lee