X language Chinese learner's common language characteristics

[歐博思]

Ever since my first day of intensive chinese language at qinghua this semester, I have been curious about researching this question "What typical mistakes does (English/Korean/French/Middle Eastern/etc) native speaker typically carry over into their Chinese?

I plan on becoming a TESOL teacher in either China or Korea after graduation, so this is the kind of thing that will both help my teaching and my students.

As a starter, here is what I have observed from people in my class:

English Natives: typically we are guilty of lackluster tones.

Koreans: difficulty with r and then c/z ch/zh pronunciation. On the first day I had a group activity in kouyu class with a Korean guy. It went like this:

Him: "Ni chong nar lai?"

Me: "....?"

Him" "Ni zhidao, ni CHong nar lai??"

Me: *reaches for electronic dictionary*

it should have been crystal clear just from the context but he stumped me nonetheless with C-> CH

French: The accent comes across as so heavy to me, and quite difficult to understand. I would like to discover why.

Middle Eastern: I can't recall the exact country, but a classmate speaks nothing but bouncy chains of second tone phrases. Has a stereotypical "Swedish bounce" to it. However, I have heard her speaking with other natives of said language and it doesn't exhibit nearly as much 'spring'.

All constructive criticisms are welcome, and please feel free to expand to other languages.

I apologize if any of this seems like flaming x language as it is not, but if it sounds like it is written as so then I am feeling under the weather right now and thus am up at almost 5 am... Admins, will rephrase things if you like.

欧博思

[Kenny同志]

One’s mother language also imposes on the sentence structure of the Chinese he or she says or writes. For those who want to avoid saying/writing Anglicized Chinese, I’d strongly recommend 思果’s 翻译研究, 翻译新究 and 译道探微. All these three books which deal with problems in English-Chinese translation are free of jargon, accessible, and enjoyable with very penetrating insights.

[Hofmann]

I'm assuming you're only talking about pronunciation.

Here is the trend.

• Sounds in the target language that exist in the languages that the learner already speaks are easier to pronounce. For example, Mandarin has a [n] initial, and so does English. Therefore few English speakers have trouble beginning syllables with [n].
  
• Sounds that are close to sounds of already known languages tend to shift to those of already known languages. For example, the Mandarin initial [ʂ] is close to the English [ʃ]. Therefore English speakers tend to pronounce Mandarin [ʂ] as [ʃ].
  
• Sounds that do not exist are more difficult to be recognized as phonemes. For example, there are phonemic tones in Mandarin, and not in English. Therefore English speakers have more difficulty recognizing tones as phonemes.
  

All letters in brackets are IPA.