Areas of equivalence between Polish and Chinese as exemplified by the functions of grammatical cases

Abstract

Recent years have seen a clearly increasing interest in learning Polish among the native speakers of Chinese. At the same time, both students and teachers struggle with the problem of a significant shortage of appropriate teaching materials. The preparation of such materials must be preceded by relevant research and theoretical reflection on various types of issues. The aim of this article is to indicate some areas of equivalence between Chinese and Polish. Due to its glottodidactic approach, the problems analysed in the article are focused on functional grammar, and particularly concerning the functional dimension of grammatical cases in Polish. The scope of structures compared has been narrowed down to the learning stage in which a Chinese student encounters this unknown and extensive grammatical category for the first time, namely up to the A1 level of language proficiency. Even though there is no declension in Chinese, the syntactic and communicative functions that particular cases fulfill in Polish are in some ways reflected in the former language. The present research has made it possible to identify those features, unusual for the Chinese learner, and to indicate particular structures or function words that are used for a similar purpose in their native language.