Pragmatic Mistakes Made by Chinese Students of Japanese and Ways of Error Eradication (exemplified by intransitive verbs and the Passive Voice in Japanese)
Long-term observation shows that Chinese language users are apt to make pragmatic language mistakes in the process of intercultural communication. The author, who has accumulated abundant factual data, studies the types of pragmatic mistakes and the causes underlying them. The article describes the differences in the world pictures of Chinese and Japanese native language users. It is typical of Japanese people to proceed from their personal identity as the starting point and to focus on the subjective and the emotional aspects of world perception. The Chinese mentality model tends to focus on objective facts. The author maintains that this cultural discrepancy in the model of world vision chiefly accounts for pragmatic errors made by Chinese learners of Japanese. To eliminate mistakes of this kind, it is advisable, first, to examine the differences in the language means employed by the target language users and, second, to study the cultural and psychological divergences in the two world pictures before plunging into practice and intercultural communication. The paper emphasizes the importance of the cultural context as a background against which verbal skills should be practiced, and dwells on the methodology of introducing the cultural context and using it as a teaching tool aimed at perfecting intercultural communication competence.