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To mother tongue language speakers, it is easy to discern the use of synonyms in different contexts, but to second language learners, the proper use of vocabulary is dependent on accumulated knowledge and experience. To prevent usage errors, students must be able to make discernments. According to ‘8,000 Chinese Vocabulary’ and ‘The Syllabus of the Graded Vocabulary for HSK’ grades words, the four communicative verbs ‘liao’, ‘tan’, ‘liao tian’, and ‘tan tian’ differ in the order in which they are introduced. Furthermore, their definitions in ‘Practical Audio Visual Chinese Student’s Handbook’ were simplified. Hence, by analysing corpus data while referencing related theories of teaching Chinese as a second language, the classification of these four communicative verbs and how to teach the grammatical use of these verbs can be established. By analysing the actual use of the verbs using a native Chinese language corpus, the use of the verbs and occurrences of errors by second language learners, as well as comparing where the book ‘The Syllabus of the Graded Vocabulary for HSK’ first introduces the verbs, the order in which the four verbs are introduced in textbooks and in ‘8,000 Chinese Vocabulary’ is different, with no deeper explanation on the semantics and grammatical use of the four verbs. Since second language learners are not completely familiar with semantics, grammar, and collocations, this results in the occurrence of different errors. While ‘liao’ and ‘tan’ differ in collocates with subjects and objects, they have similar collocations syntactically, with complements and with nouns; ‘liaotian’ and ‘tantian’ have similar subject collocates, but ‘liaotian’ has more syntactical collocations. Referencing how ‘8,000 Chinese Vocabulary’ grades the verbs, and the frequency of occurrences within native Chinese language corpora, ‘tan’ is taught before ‘liao’, while ‘liaotian’ is taught before ‘tantian’. Accounting for different learner competencies, simpler semantics and syntactical collocations should first be taught, followed by advanced semantic collocations and grammatical functions; e.g. verb duplication, aspect markers and separable verbs. It is hoped these research findings will contribute to pedagogies and that Chinese teachers are able to quickly master teaching methodologies, enabling Chinese language learners proper use of words.
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