An Error Analysis of Using Directional Complements of Vietnamese Students of Intermediate Chinese Level

Directional complement is an important language focus in Chinese grammar. Vietnamese students of intermediate Chinese level usually make some errors when they use this kind of complement. Through analyzing the compositions of Vietnamese students of intermediate Chinese level, we selected 260 sentences with directional complement errors. These errors were divided into five categories: 1) omission of directional complements, 2) over-use of directional complements, 3) wrong order of directional complements and object, 4) confusion about different types of directional complements, 5) confusion about directional complements with other complements. Particularly, the main error of Vietnamese students of intermediate Chinese level is over-use of directional complements. The main cause of this is the negative transfer from their mother tongue