tonese, or other Chinese language or dialect) indeed argues for having the Chinese learner of written English learn the spoken language simultaneously with the written one. Tone, of course, springs to mind. "Ma" in produced in four different tones resulting in four different phonemes. A similar "a" produced in English in these four tones will be accepted as a single phoneme, the tones contributing only to the meaning of the syntactical unit. Hence, the Chinese learner has difficulty in discriminating between such words as "crisis" and "crises"--whether in speaking or writing. Since there is no one-to-one correspondence between the phonemes of Mandarin and those of English, the Chinese learner often misperceives the English word and misreproduces it in writing.
Elliott (1983) remarks on the lexical distance that also separates Chinese from English. For most general terms, there is an English word for the Mandarin one. "There is a problem, however, whenever a continuum has to be categorized and divided into groups. This is well exemplified by the colours of the spectrum. The transition from the infra-red through the visible spectrum to the ultra-violet is a smooth change. English categorizes it arbitrarily as red-orange-yellow-green-blue-violet. Other languages divide the continuum in different steps. Mandarin appears to regard 'orange' as being a sub-division of yellow-xingúang. When it comes to Business English, one encounters many similar areas of possible lexical confusion--such as in units of measurement, quality of fruit, color of textile, and therapeutic effects of pharmaceutical products.
Morphologically, there are equally a number of areas which lead to confusion. Mandarin mono- or compounded monosyllabic words are never inflected. English is inflected and agglutinative--with, unfortunately for the EFL students--no fast structuring rules, given the multiethnic origin of the English language. For example, English nouns and...