This study categorized the perfect meaning of -te i-(ru) into four types: perfective, on-going, experiential, and counter-factual meanings, in order to find out how native Mandarin speakers learn a grammatical form that does not correspond to their mother tongue.The results show that native Japanese speakers often use the form to express the on-going meaning; while native Mandarin speakers often use the -te i-(ru) to express the perfective meaning. The differences may be due to the semantic features of the perfect meaning of -te i-(ru) and what was learned from the textbooks. It was a found that Mandarin speakers use -te i-(ru) with activity verbs, having the perfect meaning very frequently, which is similar to Japanese native speakers. It was also found out that native Mandarin speakers tend to use the past marker -ta as an alternative to -te i-(ru) to express the perfective meaning, and use -ru as an alternative to -te i-(ru) when expressing the experiential meaning.