A study of errors in making sentences with Chinese synonymous-similar verbs selected from HSK 3-4 vocabulary: A case study of second-year Chinese majors at Nakhon Phanom University

Abstract

            The purposes of this research were to study errors in using Chinese synonymous-similar verbs of the 2nd year Chinese majors at Nakhon Phanom University and to apply the errors to the development of Chinese synonymous-similar verb teaching and learning. The subjects of the research were 2nd year Chinese majors at Nakhon Phanom University. The instrument for data collection was a developed questionnaire which was divided into 2 parts; Part 1 Sentence Completion and Part 2 Selection of Correct Thai-Chinese Translation.
           The findings revealed two major errors in selecting Chinese verbs with synonymous or similar meanings. 1) Grammatical structures: The subjects did not fully understand grammatical structures. This directly caused errors such as grammatical structures with appropriate verbs, verb-object collocations, and types of words to collocate with verbs. 2) Semantics: Each term has its own meaning emphasis. The subjects could not clearly distinguish between different meanings. For this reason, they chose wrong types of words which were inappropriate for sentence structures. The findings indicated that these errors were influenced by the mother tongue and improper teaching and learning methods.