Alina Vamanu, Blog Post #3

The topic of transfer-based problems we might observe when working with international students has caught my attention this week. I knew that l and r are not separate sounds in Chinese. I also realized that many Chinese students probably struggle with many other types of transfer-based problems, but I was not sure what these problems might be, exactly. The article helped me understand some of the concrete language issues they may encounter when attempting to translate from Chinese into English.

This article made me think of the Romanian native speakers I taught years ago. Romanians experience similar transfer-based problems. For instance, many of my Romanian students had difficulties using the definite article correctly, because in Romanian we place the definite article at the end of the noun, rather than in front of the noun. Many of my Romanian students also struggled with verb tenses. For instance, in Romanian we do not distinguish between present perfect and past tense, or between present continuous and simple present, so it took my students a while to grasp these language subtleties and formulate correct sentences. Another problem they encountered was related to what we used to call "false friends." This may be less of a problem for Chinese students, but since Romanian is a Romance language, it shares a lot of words with English. Many of these words have common roots, but some have evolved to mean different things in the two languages. For instance, the Romanian noun "librărie" does not mean "library;" it means "bookstore." Likewise, the Romanian adverb "eventual" does not mean "eventually;" it means "possibly."

This is a rich and fascinating topic, and I look forward to listening to my fellow tutors' experiences with transfer-based problems.

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