‘I Go Yesterday or I Went Yesterday?’- Problems Faced by Pakistani Learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language

Abstract

Foreign language learners are already disadvantaged when they embark on learning another language; this is due to the firmly implanted mother tongue framework in their minds, developing right from the early childhood. This framework may be a great help in certain situations where there is some linguistic proximity found between the two languages. On the contrary, the same framework becomes one of the biggest barriers for the learner where a specific linguistic feature present in the foreign language (FL) is not available in his mother tongue (MT). This is where the phenomenon of mother tongue (MT) comes into play. The current research reports the grammatical mistakes committed by the Pakistani learners of Chinese as a foreign language (FL). The data was garnered through an essay written in Chinese by the study participants (n: 25) who were enrolled in a 6- month Diploma in Chinese after having successfully completed the Certificate Level which also lasted 6 months. The study focused on the mistakes committed by the study participants with regard to the Chinese particle “了Le”. Selinker’s ‘Interlanguage’ (IL) was used as the theoretical lens for the present study. What was found after the careful analysis of the data suggests that Pakistani learners, like any foreign language learner, fall prey to L1 interference and overgeneralization while learning the Chinese language.