Job Discussion Forums

[themanymoonsofjupiter]

why do they do this? the text clearly says "he" yet they will say "she." i know, of course, why they make that mistake in speaking without anything from which to read. but in reading? what's really behind this?

[China.Pete]

Everything that we see, like what we hear, must be processed by the brain to form recognizable patterns and meaning. Presumably, the same part of the brain that is responsible for confusing "he" and "she" when students are speaking, is also involved when they read it out loud.

[Super Mario]

Yeah, it's frustrating. We know that in the spoken form it's "ta". But the written is different, so why the same old error?
Written Chinese differentiates.

[ChineseChris]

I always thought it was because in the Chinese language he and she are the same so that when they come to say english they still think there is only one word 'he'. Could be wrong but that has always been my understanding.

[dajiang]

I still think that's why they make the mistake.

Even though they write the male 'ta' with a 'ren' radical, and the 'female 'ta' with a 'n�' radical, I got the feeling that most of the time they don't bother and just use the regular 'ta' with the 'ren' radical for both genders.

It's funny that most students just don't seems to stop making these mistakes, even after telling them and continuously correcting them a billion times.

Some interesting ideas on how you guys solve this problem?

Putting pictures of women on one side of the classroom and men on the other and collectively drone "He...he...he... *turn heads* She... she... she..."

I've tried getting texts and changing the gender of each person and personal pronoun in it. It seems to make some ss more confused instead of fluent though.

Hmm. Here's an idea. How about having them think of their own rules for this? e.g. Guys always make stupid jokes, which make you laugh --> Haha, so you say 'He'. Women always tell you to be quiet --> Shhh, so you say 'She'.

Then after they all made somekind of rule for them to memorise this, we go over the rules they thought of in the class and see which one is the funniest. I reckon this'd work.

Dajiang.

[7969]

one thing that bothers me even more than chinese using "he" when they mean "she" is when english speakers write:

"he could of done this"

when they mean to write:

"he could have done that"

i've only noticed this since i started reading stuff posted on the net. the internet is a great thing but one thing it hasnt done is made people aware of how to write properly.

7969

[Neilhrd]

I think the problem of students confusing "he" and "she" is more complex than the simple fact that the words have the same sound in Chinese.

I think there are several other factors at work here. Firstly nearly all Chinese teachers of English teach the phonic sounds of English letters singly e.g "b, b, b bee" in the early stages of primary school. Hence students never learn combined sounds such as "sh" until it is too late and fossilized errors have entered the student's sub concious.

I have tried to explain this to my Chinese colleagues and been faced with complete incomprehension. They didn't learn it in brain washing (teacher training) school and have no intention of changing now.

Secondly many Chinese speakers have difficult visually decoding English words because they are longer on the page than a Chinese character and so often focus on a single syllable or combination of letters which they recognise rather than the whole word.

This can be overcome by teaching students to break words down into syllables when learning new vocabulary but again many Chinese teachers are unwilling to do this.

Thirdly there is a cultural factor. Being male or female is part of a person's individuality and identity. In Mao's China individuality was strongly discouraged and traditional differences in gender roles obscured or changed. Chinese is a high context language. But to many Chinese I think it simply doesn't matter, in many contexts, whether a subject is male or female. So they pay no attention to using the correct pronoun unless the context requires it in their eyes.

[Roger]

I liked Neilhard's post the most. IT's a complicated psycholinguistic phenomenon. The Chinese way of teaching doesn't penetrate that deep - it stays on the top intellectual level.

There is also something to do with phonetics: it may be that Chinese learners of English visualise the spelling of English words as they speak, and while doing so may involuntarily assimilate English syllables to Chinese syllables.
THis idea occurred to me when I became aware of how often they do not pronounce the final consonant in words such as 'car' and 'card' (two consonants!): they seem to assimilate both words to CHinese 'ka', which has become a Chinese approximation of the English word 'card'.
IT's not just these two examples; maybe some research should be done to shed more light on it. I am forming the impression that Chinese shy away from 'un-CHinese' pronunciations. This doesn't quite explain why they confuse 'he' with 'she' - but 'she' could sound to a Chinese ear as having a meaning entirely divorced from the English word.

[vikdk]

[Shan-Shan]

Perhaps a simple lack of practice, and thus an absence of automatization, in addition to Chinese having one word for he-she-it, leads to the he-she problem.

Somewhere in the process of choosing, the right choice is sometimes made, and sometimes the wrong choice is made. The rules governing the choice are not consciously referenced (if the referent is a man, choose "he"; if the referent is a woman, choose "she"). Many students may just grab one or the other, and hope for the best. The stress of speaking raises "the filters"; perhaps this has some kind of flipping effect on the "he-she" rule, thus producing an incorrect usage. I remember when learning to drive hitting the gas when my mom would suddenly scream for the break. Anxiety might be a major factor in the correct choice of two options not being made.

In my own Chinese studies, I still mix up 经历 and 经验. Although I am aware of when to use which when discussing "experience", the pressure of having to speak spontaneously forces me, or I force myself out of laziness of not having mastered the usage, to just haphazardly make a choice as I feel I don't have time to think about the language before actually using it.

Awareness raising exercises, or just more opportunities to talk, with a willingness to be aware of the language they are producing, and the mistakes contained therein, might lower the number of he-she mistakes being made by students. This being said, I still often mix-up "left" and "right" when speaking English myself, and that's after 28 years of speaking (starting from the cradle!). Whatever this condition is called in Linguistics, please inform me of its name, and I'll begin to try to undo the effects.

[Yu]

And the bottom line is.... Does it really matter?

He/she what's the difference? I think there are much bigger problems than this.

[grwit]

[Yu]

I kind of like it when my husband refers to my mom as a "he".
I dont so much like it when he refers to our son as a "she".
He is aware he makes this mistake only after I point it out, but then he will continue to make it again.
Actually, I now find myself saying the wrong one.

[themanymoonsofjupiter]

[KWhitehead]

my chinese teacher was telling me about a legend of china. i guess what happened was "he grew up into a beautiful woman." i had a coughing fit.