What are common mistakes of German students?

[Jan Finster]

I wonder what common mistakes are German students make when studying Mandarin?

Are there any typical patterns? (e.g. typically mispronouncing certain sounds; wrong word order, etc).

[Michaelyus]

Certain things are common to most Western European learners of Mandarin:

 

Phonology

- wrong tones, defaulting to tone 4 (common to most Western Europe - hence the commonest way of affecting a (Western) "foreign accent" in many Chinese communities).

- 3rd tone unstable; sometimes too close to tone 2, sometimes inverted. This instability it shares with English L1s.

- prominent lack of tone 2 in German speakers (although that sample size though!). I get the anecdotal feeling that different European accents have different tonal distributions in their Chinese.

- according to this article, a 1st tone that's too low and a 4th tone that's too flat is found in German learners. I would say that both of these are common to most Western European learners of Mandarin.

 

 

For those things that are specific to German-speaking learners of Mandarin:

 

- incorrect distinguishing of /u/ from /y/ (that is, Pinyin "u" from "ü"). Specifically the "forgetting" of the /y/ in "xu", "qu", "ju" and by extension "xue", "jue", "quan" etc. Different to the southern Romance-speaking nations, English, and French L1s (who generally do not distinguish "u" from "ü" securely at all). Generally though, as the /u/ and /y/ are not merged, German speakers do seem to have accurate /u/ and /y/ where necessary.

- (the southern regions in particular) insecure production of the aspirated consonants (Pinyin k-, t-, p-, c-, ch-, q-), either by losing them altogether or overgeneralising. This is a well known bit of interference from their specific accent.

- a relatively "heavy" trochaic stress pattern. This is strongest amongst German L1s within the group of European learners that I have come across.

[Dawei3]

19 hours ago, Jan Finster said:

German students make when studying Mandarin

It's an interesting question.  My sense is that different grammar of the 2 languages could cause problems:

 

Both English & Mandarin convey meaning primarily by word-order and not word ending, whereas German relies heavily on word ending.  In addition, while English has articles articles, they play a less important role in meaning than do articles in German.  In addition, English & Chinese are primarily Subject-Verb-Object languages, so word order can be quite similar or identical.  While simple German is SVO, for longer sentences it is a verb second language.  Chinese sentences tend to be short compared to German.  I've never seen a paragraph-long sentence in Chinese, whereas long & very long sentences in German aren't unusual. 

 

My sense is that these similarities between English & Chinese make it easier for each to learn the other's language compared to a native German speaker learning Chinese.  As  a result, Germans may have more problems with word order than an English speaker.  However, I've yet to meet a Germ who could speak Chinese, so I can't say from experience (This said, so many Germans speak excellent English such that the Ger/Chin differences may be less important).  

 

It would be interesting to hear the experiences of others.  

 

Languagelog recently posted this:  https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=42675   However, the German speaking Chinese  in the video had obviously had little training, so it's unlikely to be representative.  

[Flickserve]

https://youtu.be/OedCZdetzYI

 

this German YouTuber speaks very well with sometimes mildly incorrect tones. It doesn’t affect comprehension. I think you can pick up some of the things @Michaelyus wrote about. 

[mungouk]

This book came up a few months ago when discussing problems Chinese speakers have with aspects of English:

 

Swan, M. & Smith, B. (2001) Learner English: A Teacher's Guide to Interference and other Problems (2nd ed). Cambridge University Press.

 

It has 22 chapters each dealing with specific issues native speakers of a particular language, or language group, have with English.  It's a valuable reference and must have taken a good while to research and compile.  As well as grammatical interference it also has plenty on problems that learners have with phonology, intonation, stress, punctuation etc.

 

Is there anything equivalent for speakers of various languages learning Chinese?

 

 

[889]

Although it's not broken down by mother tongue, 《外国人学汉语病句分析》 (1986) contains lots and lots of sentences typical of bad foreigner Chinese. Deals with written Chinese, not 口语 problems like pronunciation, though.

 

[Wurstmann]

7 hours ago, Flickserve said:

this German YouTuber speaks very well with sometimes mildly incorrect tones

There's also this guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux4GgfkvSiU