Revista simpozionului Eficiență și calitate în educație - 19 mai 2017 Eficiență și calitate în educație | Page 135

BRIEF ANALYSIS
ON ROMANIAN STUDENTS’ LANGUAGE TRANSFER
IN CHINESE LEARNING
Wang Yuqin, Confucius Institute Sibiu
Abstract:
Language transfer refers to the language learners applying knowledge from one language to another. Romania is
located in the South-eastern Europe, which is far away from China, Romanian as a Romance language also has a
big difference from Chinese. Even though, we could still find the language transfer phenomenon when Romanian
students learning Chinese, applying the Romanian language knowledge to Chinese. To analysis how the
Romanian language is transferred and having impact during the Chinese learning process, would be very helpful
for Chinese teaches’ teaching and researching activities, as well as making the students’ Chinese learning much
easier.
Key words: language transfer, Romanian students, Chinese learning.
1. Introduction
Language transfer has been a field of research in the last few decades. Language transfer is a
phenomenon that happens usually when the language learners’ trying to learn another new
language, the transfer could be from the knowledge of the native language or any other
acquired languages to the target one. When students learn a new language, the language
learning process is always influenced by the languages the learners already know, this
influence is known as language transfer.
The role of the native language during the second language acquisition is always a
focus for the researchers, as well as in the third language, fourth language learning process. A
lot of researches have proofed that, language transfer is not only a result or language
expression, it is also a psychological process and a compensatory learning strategy. When the
learners don’t have enough knowledge about the target one, they will subconsciously use the
knowledge acquired before, the phonetic, the vocabulary, and the grammar and so on, this is
how the language transfer takes place.
Language transfer could be positive transfer or negative transfer. To study and do
researches on language transfer could be very helpful for both teaching and learning foreign
language activities.
Contrastive Analysis is also known as Contrastive Linguistics, it focuses on discovering
the differences and similarities of the two languages. By comparing the native and the target
languages, identifying the different language and culture, it could make our teaching activity
more effective. As the teachers have the function of leading students to learn, when the
differences of the two languages are taken into consideration advanced, the errors caused by
negative transfer would be avoided effectively.
Chinese (Hànyǔ or Zhōngwén) is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, it has
four tones. If we say that Chinese Characters are a writing system of Chinese, this system,
which means the Chinese Characters, can somehow show the meaning of the characters,
according to the forms they have, it may also show us the pronunciation from some extent.
Pinyin is a way to transform the Chinese characters into Latin letters and the pinyin system
includes four diacritics denoting tones, which shows the pronunciation of the Chinese
Characters, in this way, it can also make the foreigners’ Chinese learning much easier in the
beginning.
Romanian language is the official language in Romania and the Republic of Moldova.
There are around 24 million people who speak Romanian as the first language, 4 million
people as the second language. As Latin is the original of Romanian language, Romanian uses
the Latin letters. Unlike the Chinese language, in Romanian language, there is the gender,
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