Acquisition du français par les Chinois

• Main Author: Christine Cuet
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: ACEDLE 2017-04-01
• Series: Recherches en didactique des langues et des cultures
• Subjects: time; tense; future; French; Chinese; acquisition
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/rdlc/1532

Culture is embedded in language, thus time is represented differently in Chinese and in French. In Chinese, the future, be it objectively near or far, probable, certain or hypothetical, is expressed by modals, which is also the case in English. Adverbs and adverbial particles provide complementary aspectual-temporal information. The French system of verbs is difficult to acquire, partly due to the complexity of conjugation, and partly because of the wide variety of contexts in which each verb form is used. The corpus studied shows that Chinese learners at a B2 level still have difficulty understanding the temporal, modal and aspectual functions of French as well as the use of spatial and temporal prepositions. Traditional styles of teaching and French language manuals may be partly responsible for the recurrent errors observed.