Top 5 Mistakes for Chinese speakers of English

Hi, I have come across this article and I think it's good to share with you coz this is about the mistakes of Chinese speakers when speaking English.

Hi there! Are you a native Chinese speaker with English as your 2^nd language or are you an expat living in China for an extended time?

Top 5 Mistakes for Chinese speakers of English

I’ve been living in different parts of China for around 3 years now and have met a lot of nice and interesting people. I have also studied a bit of Mandarin, hoping in vain to be able to speak Chinese one day. Throughout all my conversations I’ve noticed a few very typical phrases that Chinese native speakers tend to use when communicating in English. After identifying these expressions I have also noticed that surprisingly it’s not just the locals, but expats who have lived here for a while also use these phrases naturally. Here are 5 of my favourites:

1) “Hong Kong people”, “mainland people”, or “Shanghai people”. This is clearly a back-translation from Chinese (“???” / “xiang gang ren” / “hoeng gong jan”) to English. However since there are no New York people or London people, there are New Yorkers and Londoners. The more natural way of saying this would be Hong Kongers or Shanghainese, although I admit that this doesn’t work always; Guangzhou-ers or Xianese sound very strange to me.

2) Stressful. As in “How was your day?” “Oh, I am so stressful.“ This comes from Chinese as well, where nouns, adjectives and adverbs can have the same form. The differences between these don’t correspond to Chinese language rules and thus the confusion. In English work can be stressful but a person can be stressed.

3) Past tense, or the lack of it. Because time is marked differently in Chinese (using an aspect marker for example), in “Yesterday I go to the cinema” the English conjugation is omitted and thus the verb in the sentence takes a strange turn.

4) “My two cat is at home”. No list would be complete without mentioning plurals. This mistake is also due to the grammatical differences between the two languages. Chinese doesn’t use plural forms, it simply adds a number in front of the noun.

5) Last but not least “actually” – This one is my personal favourite. Never in my life have I heard this word so often as in Chinese speaking countries. Even though I cannot cite any statistical evidence but I have the feeling that locals love to start their sentences with “actually”.

Most of these mistakes among native Chinese speakers are caused by so called language interference, when the rules of the 1^st language (Chinese) are applied for the 2^nd language(English). As for the expats I guess, that after hearing these phrases so often they unintentionally pick them up and start using them. If you think you recognise yourself here, don’t despair. Once these pitfalls have been identified, they can be easily fixed. Fortunately none of these issues are so serious that they would cause confusion or misunderstandings.
I hope after reading this article you’ll be able to identify these phrases and enjoy English in one of its many a local flavours. Keep on communicating and let this be a reminder that speech seeming so natural to you might not be so natural for others. Actually.

From: http://www.translationmarket.com.hk/resources/Top-5-Signs-of-Chinese-English.aspx