A Comparative Analysis of Negative Expressions in Mandarin and Thai and its Teaching Applications: Using Thai Learners as an Example

• Main Authors: Nalin Thaveerungroj, 李明慈
• Other Authors: I-NI TSAI
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/5rz5fa

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 華語教學碩士學位學程 === 106 === Negative expressions are an extremely important aspect of human communication. “bù” and “méi” are not only the most commonly used negative adverbs in Mandarin, but they also pose difficulties for learners of Mandarin as a second or foreign language. Many studies have investigated the distribution of “bù” and “méi” from different perspectives, such as their use with the concept of time, with the concepts of subjectivity and objectivity, and in relation to structure and semantics. In teaching materials, however, the concept of time is the most commonly used context. There are still many aspects of the use of “bù” and “méi” to be explored. In different scenarios, their semantic distribution varies. “bù” and “méi” seem simple, but teaching and learning how to use them remains a significant problem. The Thai negative adverbs “mai” and “mai dai”, are very similar to the Chinese negative adverbs “bù” and “méi”, but do not exactly correspond in their semantics and usage. “mai” is generally used for negation. While also widely used, “mai dai” is a compound word consisting of “mai” and “dai” and is therefore not found in Thai dictionaries. This study combines quantitative and qualitative analysis. First, a translation test was implemented to examine the negative expression errors of Thai learners of Mandarin. The test results showed that more than fifty percent of their answers were wrong, indicating that Thai learners struggle with Mandarin negative expression forms. The errors were divided into 6 types: “mistake generation”, “missing”, “misintentional”, “misleading”, “semantic errors”, and “avoidance”. Also, based on the error rate of responses to each of the test questions, the level of learning difficulty of “bù” and “méi in different contexts was calculated for Thai learners. In addition, a corpus was used to observe the respective collocations of “bù” and “méi”. By combining the classification of errors, the learning difficulty levels, and the corpus analysis, an effective pedagogical approach to the teaching of the negative adverbs “bù” and “méi” was developed, including practical teaching sequences and suggestions.