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Correct Chinese Learning Students’ Mistakes Cautiously

Everybody can make mistakes, not to speak of the overseas students who learn at Chinese language school because learning Chinese is not an easy job. Different levels of Chinese language learners make various mistakes. Let’s have a look what kind of mistakes students make.

For those students who attend to school to study in China at the elementary level, they often make some ridiculous mistakes. Mistakes made by these students are mostly caused by the limited vocabulary they learned. And some mistakes will make you can’t help laughing, but who doesn’t make mistakes.

I have ever tutored a student of the elementary level before. This guy, after he learned how to express girlfriend in Chinese, he start to show off before me and said: “老师,我的女朋友很热.” I was suddenly shocked, wondering why he talked about his girlfriend when we are talking about how to study Mandarin in Yunnan better. I thought what he said has nothing to do with the temperature of his girlfriend but about the figure. Finally I found the reason is he has just learned “天气很热”.

Actually, most lovely students are as creative as this one to create the Chinese language, especially the American students. Therefore, it is better for students to go to standard school to study Mandarin.

As we know, the relationship between Chinese and English or that of any two languages is not just the simple recoding relevance. But when students study Chinese, they will inevitably turn to translation for help to understand and then speak it by the way their mother tongue goes. In this way, everything turns out to be wrong.

For this kind of mistake, it is enough for teachers to correct them. That will be better it teachers teach Mandarin language by pointing out the reason shortly and accurately. For example, you can say: “热” is for weather, not for person and “短” is not for people’s height, usually for time or length.

Even students of the intermediate and advanced stages can make some mistakes that drive you crazy. Most mistakes are about the differences of the similar words. But more are coming as long as they learn Mandarin.

Teachers may meet students that show great interest in studying words and getting to the bottom of something. After they learned some new words when study in China, they may ask a series of questions. For example, after learning “今天”, they will ask how to say tomorrow, the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow.

When this situation happens when students learn Chinese language, just keep our teaching principles: student is our God and you can’t refuse to answer when God asks. But we have another principle when answering, that is, only answer but never extend. You can’t, for instance, tell the students all relative words like “喜爱”, “酷爱”, “偏爱”, “热爱”, “钟爱”, “宠爱”, “溺爱” and “疼爱” after teaching the word “爱”.

If students fail to find an appropriate word to complete the sentence to express what they intend to, teachers should speak and act cautiously.

Firstly, do not supply the words immediately because they often react slower when they learn Chinese in China. If you do that, it will stop students thinking process and fail to help students to select words. What’s more, as time goes on, students will be accustomed to wait the answer. When the next time they come across this situation, they will give up thinking and waiting for your answer. So just give them more time to figure it out and you can tell them when they fail.

Another situation is that when students learn Mandarin, they may speak out one English word and ask how to express in Chinese. Under this circumstance, you should not pick out the word you have learned before to them because the words applied to different sentences have various meaning. For example, the word “abandon” carries the meaning of “放弃”, “放纵”, “遗弃” and “抛弃”. So the question is which one you will choose to tell the students.

You can just read the whole sentence and choose the proper word according to the context. If there are more than two possible answers, just choose the simple one. You can choose “我的女朋友很漂亮” instead of “我的女朋友美丽动人”.

The situations discussed above are some mistakes often made by students. Teachers should pay more attention to how to correct them appropriately.

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