What do Chinese students struggle with in English? (2024)

What do Chinese students struggle with in English?

The linguistic problems encountered by Chinese EFL learners were vocabulary and pronunciation, grammar, and oral presentation.

What are the difficulties for Chinese students learning English?

One of the biggest challenges for Chinese speakers learning English is pronunciation. This is because the two languages have very different phonetic systems. Chinese is a tonal language, meaning that the pitch of the speaker's voice can change the meaning of a word.

What do Chinese speakers struggle with in English?

Chinese speakers sometimes find it difficult to pronounce English vowels consistently, especially since the spelling system of English is not regular, so the same letter(s) may correspond to more than one sound, depending on which word it appears in.

How difficult is English for Chinese speakers?

For some Chinese friends I know, there are certain sounds that seem almost unattainable in English (initial r's, diphthongs, etc). Communication and grammatical accuracy – English grammar is extremely complex, because it's really just a mashup of different languages, so there's hardly any consistency.

What is the biggest problem in learning English to student?

What are the difficulties faced by students learning English language?

In addition to limited vocabulary and pronunciation, ESL students may also struggle with listening and speaking skills. Without strong listening and speaking skills, your students may have difficulty participating in class discussions, understanding lectures, and expressing themselves in English.

Why is Chinese harder to learn than English?

One of the biggest reasons that learning Chinese is more difficult than learning English is due to the vast differences in vocabulary and sentence structure. While English has a relatively simple sentence structure, Chinese is a tonal language with a complex grammar structure that can take years to master.

What are common English mistakes for Mandarin speakers?

What is the most difficult language for Chinese speakers to learn?

Arabic is a language most Mandarin speakers will find challenging. Its writing system is an abjad, which functions very differently from both Chinese characters and the English alphabet because it uses letters to represent consonants but not all vowels, and it uses a cursive script, so letters combine and change forms.

Why is Chinese so different from English?

Chinese is a language made up of characters or symbols. Each character or word has an individual meaning. English, on the other hand, is made up of 26 alphabet letters. Each letter has no meaning of its own; a word is a combination of letters.

What percent of China is fluent in English?

A 2017 article from The Telegraph also suggests that less than 1 percent of people in China (some 10 million) speak English conversationally. According to a report on China Daily, many students start learning English in kindergarten before they start school.

What sounds do Chinese have difficulty pronouncing?

How fast can an English speaker learn Chinese?

“Is it hard to learn Chinese?” According to the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) scale, it will take English speakers 88 weeks (2,200 hours of active learning) to reach native/bilingual Chinese proficiency. Chinese is one of the 5 languages which is most challenging to learn for native English speakers.

Why do English language learners struggle in school?

In an ideal world, every student would be getting the same amount of attention from their teachers and progressing at more-or-less at the same pace. Unfortunately, the combination of a crowded classroom, an unoptimized curriculum, and the language barrier often makes it difficult for ELLs to keep up.

Why do English language learners struggle with reading?

ELLs are more likely than native speakers to lack the background knowledge necessary for understanding texts. ELLs' prior educational experiences may have been substandard or interrupted, so reading texts that assume certain prior knowledge becomes difficult.

What difficulties problems have you most encountered in the English language?

Inconsistent Pronunciation

You can't always guess a word's pronunciation just by its spelling. Even just the word 'read' for example can be spoken in different ways depending on which tense of the verb you are trying to use. Some words may confuse learners a little bit more with the trickery of having silent letters.

How can English language learning problem be solved?

The best way to solve this problem is through familiarity. Talk to English speakers as often, listen to English-language audio books, watch English-language movies and TV shows without dubs or subtitles, and so on. This will gradually build up your understanding and make spoken English easier to follow.

What are the factors affecting students difficulties in speaking English?

Students' speaking performance could be affected by factors that come from performance conditions (time pressure, planning, standard of performance and amount of support), affective factors (such as motivation, confidence and anxiety), listening ability, topical knowledge and feedback during speaking activities.

Why is Chinese the most difficult language?

One reason Mandarin is seen as the most challenging to learn is because its writing system uses characters that might be difficult to grasp for those accustomed to writing with the Latin alphabet, according to the language learning platform Babbel.

Do Chinese people want to learn English?

"Although Chinese people are proud of their own culture and language, they are generally willing to learn about Western cultures and languages." English is a compulsory subject in China's standard national curriculum. Many Chinese students begin learning English at an early age, some even in kindergarten.

Why do Chinese need to learn English?

People in China no longer have to learn Russian, the language of their former communist ally. Instead, Chinese citizens would have to acquire the new global language of English in order to communicate with foreign investors and the increasing number of foreign visitors visiting China.

What letters do Chinese have trouble with?

Chinese learners have particular difficulty when it comes to the English sounds /l/ and /r/. This is because in Chinese languages there are no sounds which directly correspond to these sounds.

Do Chinese and English speakers think about time differently?

Mandarin speakers talk about time vertically more often than English speakers do, and in these studies, Mandarin speakers appear eight times more likely to construct vertical representations of time than are English speakers.

What is the hardest language in the world?

Mandarin is unanimously considered the most difficult language to master and is spoken by over a billion people in the world.

Is Chinese or Spanish harder to learn?

Learning Chinese is significantly harder to learn than Spanish for native English speakers. According to the U.S. Foreign Service Institute, learning Chinese takes 88 weeks of full-time study. On the other hand, learning Spanish takes 24 weeks of full-time study.