A Comparative Study On The Acquisition Of The You-sentence By Japanese And American Students Based On The Chinese Interlanguage Corpus

The You-sentence is a frequently-used sentence pattern in modern Chinese. Meanwhile, with diverse sub-patterns and rich semantics, it brings difficulty for foreign students in their learning, and is used with low accuracy. Based on the Chinese interlanguage corpus, the present paper undertakes a comparative study on the acquisition of the You-sentence by Japanese and American students guided by theories of Error Analysis and Interlanguage. Through comparing the correct use and errors of Japanese and American learners in the interlanguage corpus, the following conclusion is drawn:Firstly, in terms of sentence acquisition, all the sub-patterns of the You-sentence are learned in the same sequence by both Japanese and American students except for one sub-pattern, which shows that L2 learners, despite of their different language backgrounds, display a similar acquiring sequence. On the other hand, the difference lies in that while American students’ sentence accuracy rate is higher, Japanese students are more open in using different sub-patterns.Secondly, in terms of learner errors, though students from the two different countries tend to make certain common mistakes, the error types are also different-Japanese learners are more apt to have problems in sentence structure while American learners have difficulty in using correct vocabulary, which we believe is ensued from the similarities and differences in structure, writing and word meaning among the Chinese, English and Japanese languages.In addition, tentative suggestions to the teaching of You-sentence are also proposed in this paper with the aim of providing some reference for teaching Chinese as a foreign language.