This includes a contrastive study of English and Chinese noun phrases, verbal phrases, and word order and discusses common mistakes made by English speakers learning Chinese. Mistakes often made by English speakers due to differences between the two languages are divided into three categories: the first is mistakes in word order where the English speaker transliterates English word order directly into Chinese (e.g., "Thank you very much" becomes "syeh syeh ni fei chang" whereas the correct Chinese word order is: "fei chang syeh syeh ni"); the second, errors in grammatical structure, showing: (1) influence of English in noun phrases, verbal phrases, conjunctions, and others; (2) the difficulty points in Chinese; (3) complications due to prepositional phrases; (4) adjectives used as predicates; and (5) misuse of adverbs; and the third category is inappropriate use of words in various forms: noun, adjective, verb, auxiliary, adverb and "other," which is a "catch-all" category for problems that are hard to classify. Some general rules for both languages are provided in the conclusion. Contains 17 references. (WW)