A Study on Acquisition Errors and Teaching Strategies for Bumian and Nanmian in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language

Abstract

This study addresses the acquisition challenges of the Chinese near-synonyms "Bumian" (不免) and "Nanmian" (难免). Based on 207 sample sentences from the HSK Dynamic Composition Corpus and the Global Chinese Interlanguage Corpus, it systematically reveals their core distinctions across semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic dimensions: Semantically, "Nanmian" emphasizes objective inevitability, while "Bumian" conveys subjective emotional inference and describes realized states. Syntactically, "Nanmian" functions as both an adjective and adverb, fits the "是……的" construction, and permits redundant negation (e.g., "难免不受影响" “cannot avoid being unaffected”). "Bumian" is exclusively adverbial, serves only as an adverbial modifier, entirely rejects the "是……的" structure, and frequently co-occurs with "有些/自然/起来" (e.g., "不免骄傲起来" “cannot help feeling proud”). Corpus analysis identifies bidirectional substitution errors among learners, primarily stemming from confusion between objective inevitability and subjective inference, significantly influenced by L1 transfer: European/American learners overuse "Nanmian" due to direct English translation. Japanese/Korean learners overextend "inevitability" and frequently substitute "Bumian". In this regard, this paper attempts to construct a three-dimensional teaching system of "explicit formal differences → quantification of semantic tendencies → pragmatic scenario matching": locking the essence of word types through syntactic slots, cutting semantic boundaries with quantitative thresholds, and driving language scenario training, aiming to cure the systematic errors caused by ambiguous interpretations in textbooks and provide an operational path for teaching Chinese as a foreign language.