The difficulties in Chinese language acquisition of Sinhala speaking students
Sammanie Upadya Kandambi · SSRN Electronic Journal · 2016
Chinese is one of the most ancient languages in the world spoken by the people not only in China mainland and special regions. Nowadays learning Chinese language has become important among several countries due to the issues linked to economic development. What is actually Chinese language? Chinese language is a historical language which belongs to Chinese-Tibeten language family. It belongs one of the most historical letters called Hanzi. Recent times, Sri Lanka has also been stepped towards teaching Chinese language as a second language in order to overcome communication difficulties. In order to understand the difficulties in Chinese language acquisition, it is important to analyze the structure of both languages through a comparative study. When it comes to acquire a foreign language, we used to acquire comparing with our own mother tongue, Sinhala. When Sinhala students learn Chinese language, the major problem that might be occurred is the difference in between language structures of Chinese and Sinhala as Sinhala follows SOV (subject, object, verb) structure and Chinese follows SVO (subject, verb, object) language structure. Secondly, when learning Chinese, students may face number of acquisition errors due to the absence of several language phrases in their own mother tongue. For instance, in Chinese, there are several set phrases such as mei guan xi” (It's ok), “bu yong xie” (no thanks), “bu ke qi” (no need to be polite) which are not appearing in Sinhala language. Thus, the learners are in trouble due to the absence of those phrases in Sinhala. Therefore, Sinhala speaking students should also keep in touch with the English language in order to solve the communication problems somehow as no such particular word phrases in their own language. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the difficulties faced by Sinhala speaking students and provide a clear understand about the difference in between Sinhala and Chinese languages.