Syntactical and Morphological Roots of Japanese Students' Common Grammatical Mistakes in Writing Chinese

概要

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Based on the language materials collected from Chinese Writing I, II, III, & IV at Meishodai in the year of 2003, this research finds that one of the most common grammatical problems of Japanese students in writing Chinese is word order confusion. This includes the misplacement of verbs, model verbs, adverbs, complements, and prepositional phrases. The syntactical root of word order mistakes of Japanese students is that the basic word order of Chinese is Subject-Verb-Object whereas the order of Japanese is Subject-Object-Verb. The reversed positions of the verb and object in the two languages cause Japanese students' confusion in the placement of verbs and other elements. The morphological root of word order problems of Japanese students is a result of the difference between an isolating language and an agglutinative language. As an isolating language, Chinese has no verb conjugation, that is, no inflection of verbs. The meaning of a sentence depends on the order of all morphemes. In Chinese, almost every word consists of a single morpheme, whereas Japanese is an agglutinative language that relies on bound morphemes to express the meaning of the sentence. Word order in Japanese is usually not critical as long as words are followed by appropriate particles.