When I first moved to China in 1998, I thought I would impress my class by using some Chinese in my speech about American weddings (婚礼). I told them everyone brings a gift to the wedding for the couple. As soon as I said this, all of the students looked surprised. I knew I had said something wrong. I realized that instead of telling them that everybody brings gifts to the hun li for the couple, I had said people bring gifts for them at the li hun!

I get laughs from some of my students because I often make mistakes and my Chinese sounds strange at times. But I tell them that sometimes their English is really strange too.

One asks, “What are you like to do in your free time?” And the other answers, “I very like basketball.” I find that even good English speakers make such mistakes. The second is by far the most common mistake I have heard among Chinese English speakers. It is a result of first thinking in Chinese and then translating each word in the sentence into English. This, of course, makes some Chinese people’s English sound strange.

“We should get off the car here,” a student told me. My school had asked two students to show me around the city by taxi. In English countries, we “get off” a bike, bus, or train. However, when we leave a car, we say “get out of the car”. Perhaps the student had learned “get off” means xia in Chinese and he thought the phrase (短语) could be followed by any means of transportation. To avoid such mistakes, you should take collocations (搭配) seriously. Only learning vocabulary and grammar is not enough.

Some of my students sound more like a book or machine than a human. Perhaps they have gotten used to depending on books. You can also read English books out loud or use a CD, but you need the real thing. If you have a chance to hear a native speaker from an English­speaking country, practice repeating what you hear. They can teach you how to have a conversation.

【小题1】Why did the students feel surprised?

A．American weddings are difficult to organize.

B．The author’s Chinese was as fluent as Chinese.

C．The author used a completely wrong Chinese word.

D．Everyone must bring a gift to an American wedding.

【小题2】What can cause strange English in China according to the author?

A．Spelling mistakes.	B．Direct translation.
C．Cultural difference.	D．Wrong pronunciations.

【小题3】What can we infer about the student who said “We should...here”?

A．He might be poor at vocabulary.

B．He might mistake “car” for “taxi”．

C．He might know very little about the city.

D．He might pay little attention to collocations.

【小题4】What does the author want to share in the last paragraph?

A．Common mistakes made by Chinese English learners.

B．Differences between Chinese and American culture.

C．Suggestions on improving conversational skills.

D．His experience of learning English.