Contrastive linguistic approaches as a key to dilute the stereotype of Chinese as a superhard language

Abstract

The negative impact of the widespread stereotype that Chinese is a superhard foreign language on beginning learners is obvious. For Chinese learners who are not from the Chinese character culture circle, it is especially common for them to fear Chinese characters. Chinese characters, especially the shapes and lack of phonetic clues to pronunciation, usually give the first impression that Chinese is difficult to learn. Therefore, when they first learn Chinese, they often hope to replace Chinese characters with Chinese Pinyin, so as to bypass Chinese characters as a “major obstacle” in Chinese learning. Even some Chinese teachers also intentionally or unconsciously comply to the requests of Chinese beginners and use Chinese pinyin to replace Chinese characters in the teaching process to resolve the students' psychological fear of Chinese learning. However, this type of learning and teaching method that ignores the important role of Chinese characters in Chinese learning is very misleading. Because there are many homophones in Chinese, this avoidance strategy often brings a burden rather than relief to the learning of Chinese in a long run. In fact, only mastery of the original features of Chinese characters in Chinese learning can effectively promote Chinese learning and reduce the psychological barriers for students' difficulty in Chinese learning. For adult Chinese learners, through the comparative analysis of the characters of Chinese and their mother tongues (English, for example), giving priority to Chinese characters in teaching and learning and restoring the auxiliary functions of Chinese Pinyin like International Phonetic Alphabets to English will definitely be of help to students. Students can use flexible methods to explore the meaning and pronunciation of Chinese characters, use the language knowledge of the mother tongue to recognize, understand and deconstruct Chinese, and observe and learn Chinese in a familiar way, thus reducing the psychological fear of Chinese learning. In teaching practice, we found that leading beginning learners to positively face Chinese characters can help them accept Chinese characters faster. The observation also found that beginners who accept Chinese characters faster and use Chinese characters more frequently are significantly more advanced than those who rely on excessive dependence on Pinyin to learn Chinese.