Syntactic Approaches to Tertiary Total Beginner Students of Chinese

Abstract

It has been known in our field that the basic word order in English is “who, what, where and when” while that order in Chinese is “who, when, where and what”. We have for years also observed that the differences in basic word order between the two languages are the major causes for typical mistakes that English-speaking students of Chinese often make. This chapter discusses how to guide our tertiary total beginner students of Chinese to establish a conceptual understand o the differences between the two language word orders to enable them to significantly reduce making such mistakes hence laying a good foundation, which is of paramount importance. We further noticed and termed the simple tra..