Re: The pitfall of Chinese/Mandarin

From: "Yoon Ha Lee"

>  laokou wrote:
> > And Hungarian.
> Korean too.  :-)
> In Korean it gets even better/worse: the "3rd person
> pronoun" in Korean really is a demonstrative.  <G>
I steered clear of that part of the Orient because we've had discussions on
the list before about whether Japanese has distinguishing pronouns. It does,
of course. "Kare" for "he" and "kanojoo" for "she". I've only heard them
used in translationese examples, where natives seemed to prefer genderless
"ano hito", "kono hito" etc. Japanese students of English also made s/he
mistakes all over the place, making me wonder how entrenched the
kare/kanojoo distinction really was (or a faux distinction à la chinoise).

One wonders (suspects) if Korean ESL students make the same error in
English.

Nevertheless, it ain't a pitfall.

Kou

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