Pitfalls in Chinese

[beirne]

Back in high school when I was learning Spanish I bought a book called "1001 Pitfalls in Spanish". It was very useful because you could browse through it and find short discussions on various tricky parts of the langauage. I looked and they don't have one for Chinese. I got to wondering, though, what sorts of pitfalls might go in such a book. Here are a few of my ideas:

1. 们 is only used to make personal pronouns and some personal nouns plural.
   
2. Non-personal nouns do not receive a suffix to indicate that they are plural.
   
3. Adding 了 to a sentence is not always the way to indicate that the sentence happened in the past.
   
4. While Pinyin is phonetic, it is often not pronounced the way you would expect from knowing a phonetic language like Spanish.
   
5. Chinese does not have tense built into its grammar.
   

BTW, since my subject is slightly ambiguous I looked up the word for pitfall in Chinese so both interpretations are covered. It is 陷阱.

[Pravit]

Sounds interesting! Do they have books like this for other languages? I was composing an e-book of sorts entitled "100 errors (or more), or, how to learn Russian the hard way." But it was mainly just a long list of errors I had made(in some cases repeatedly), along with corrections and some commentary. What sort of stuff do they discuss in these books?

[beirne]

They have them for Spanish, French, English, German, and Italian, although the Italian one is out of print. The Spanish one covers issues with pretty much every part of speech. A couple of examples are "Before words beginning with i or hi, the conjunction y becomes e" and "The present subjunctive is never used in a clause introduced by si. When the English verb is in the present in an "if" clause, the Spanish verb will be present indicative". Both of these are accompanied by examples of usage.

[in_lab]

I saw a book like this once at Border's. I think it was published by HK University Press. It looked really good but it was expensive. I think it was around $20-30.