Abstract: 
In their acquisition of the Chinese language, English native speakers tend to overuse tense markers, aspectual markers, pronouns, connectives, verbs and long sentences. There has been a great deal of research on such acquisition behaviours. Rich data have been provided about these problems, but the deep-rooted cause of English native speakers’ difficulty in acquiring Chinese has not yet been fully probed into and brought to light. The present paper shares the ideas that language is the carrier of thought and it can represent the unique paradigm of how a nation who uses the language perceives and understands the world, and thus it suggests that English native speakers in their acquisition of Chinese need to familiarize themselves with the idiosyncratic character of the language representing the Chinese mode of perception and understanding of the world. Based on this suggestion, the paper puts forth the point of view that in dissecting the world and in ways of thinking, the Chinese nation focuses predominantly upon space and the English people upon time, and thus the Chinese language is inherently spatiality-oriented, while the English language is genetically temporality-oriented. 
An investigation of the early record of Chinese language reveals that the overwhelming majority of verbs are composed of nouns or nominal components. As nouns are typically used to express things or entities that are bounded in space, they are definable in terms of spatiality. 

Moreover, it is not necessary in many cases to have a predicate verb in Chinese sentences, and they can be only made up of all nouns. That is to say, placing nouns side by side without a clear connection can form a sentence in Chinese.
   
The spatiality of Chinese gives its native speakers unusual flexibility in structuring different linguistic units. Whether it is the combination of morphemes into words, the combination of words into phrases, the combination of clauses into composite sentences or the combination of sentences into texts, Chinese is often structurally discrete and chunky in the juxtaposition of its linguistic units without the use of concord or agreement, whereas English is structurally linear, cohesive and continuous, with its linguistic units in a sentence usually cohesively united by their concord or agreement in number, gender, case and person, so as to form a noticeable one-dimensional linear sequence. These structural differences reflect the discrepancies between spatiality and temporality hidden behind the two different Chinese and English modes of thinking and their different linguistic structures. 
   
Syntactically, Chinese sentences are composed of juxtaposed clauses or words which are arranged in a flexible order and governed by semantics, rather than explicit connectives. That is why run-on sentences and even one-nominal-phrase sentences can be popularly used. In English, on the other hand, clauses and words are linked by lexical devices, and that is why run-on sentences are very rare and one-nominal-phrase sentences are usually not acceptable. Similarly, in textual construction, sentences in Chinese are loosely connected, without overt marking to indicate their textual relations, while sentences in English are arranged cohesively to achieve textual continuity in both form and meaning through the use of connectives. 
   
It is thus proposed that the spatiality-temporality duality be used as an overarching typological parameter to account for the underlying reason for English native speakers’ trouble in acquiring Chinese.