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As anyone who has tried to learn a second language knows, it is not simply a matter of learning new words, of substituting one word for another. Even when we do find a translation of a particular word in a dictionary, it doesn’t mean that the word is used in the same way as its equivalent in English. For example, an ESL student who had learned in a vocabulary book that ‘vulnerable’ meant ‘open’, could not understand why he could not write the sentence ‘could you please vulnerable the window.’ In addition to meaning getting ‘lost in translation’, other languages differ structurally from English in many ways, some of which are summarized below. Word order: ·
English
uses mainly subject/verb/object word order.
Example: ‘He told me that he had given the book to James.’ German uses
SVO in independent clauses and SOV (with the auxiliary verb last) in
dependent clauses. Example: ‘He told me that he the book to James given
had. ·
In
English, subjects need to come before verbs except for questions where the
order is reversed. In Spanish, however, the following are correct:
‘yesterday has arrived a new student’ (statement) or ‘why you didn’t eat your
dinner?’ (question). A German, on the other
hand, would say ‘yesterday has a new student arrived’ and ‘why ate you not your dinner?’ · Other languages have different rules for placement of pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs. When a word order combination is possible in the student’s first language but not in English, it is difficult to ‘unlearn’ it, resulting in errors such as ‘I have been already to the bank.’ Verb tenses: ·
In
Chinese verbs don’t have tenses; instead, time words (like ‘yesterday’) need
to be placed around the verb to show when something happened/is happening/will
happen. ·
In
English, we cannot use the ‘have + past participle’ tense (present perfect)
with time words referring to finished past time. For example, we cannot
say ‘I have seen that movie yesterday.’ However, in German, French, or
Spanish, this would be perfectly acceptable. ·
English
has ‘simple’ and ‘progressive’ forms of tenses. For example, although
they are both present tenses, there is a difference between ‘I run’ and ‘I am
running.’ Other languages do not make this distinction, or they make it
differently. · Other languages do not use ‘do/does/did’ to make questions, as in ‘what does he like?’ or ‘what did you say?’ Typical errors (depending on the way questions are formed in the student’s first language) may include: ‘what he likes?’ or ‘what likes he?’ Agreement: · In English, adjectives aren’t marked for being singular or plural. In other languages, adjectives which describe plural nouns must also be made plural. Typical error: ‘There are many differents ideas.’ Count/non-count: · In English, nouns are either countable (toys, books) or not countable (information, furniture). Nouns that are not countable cannot be made plural. Other languages do not have this distinction. Typical error: ‘He gave me many informations.’ Articles: · Many Asian and eastern European languages do not have the words ‘a’, ‘an’, or ‘the’; they simply do not exist in the language. Students from these countries, therefore, do not know how to use those words in English. Trying to learn ‘rules’ is frustrating because there are too many exceptions to each rule to make learning them efficient. Other students may come from language backgrounds where articles are used more than in English, resulting in sentences like ‘the life is difficult.’
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