English has both tense and aspect markers, while Chinese only has aspect markers, which may cause tense-aspect errors for Chinese learners who learn English as a foreign language. Based on the data retrieved from the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), this article probes into the error ratio among learner groups, and conducts a case study of the advanced group in order to describe the characteristics of these errors in their writings, which is followed by a further query into their inter-lingual causes. It is concluded that these errors, which share inter-lingual similarity with Chinese, are rooted in the English people’s preference for temporality and the Chinese people’s preference for spatiality in their respective language structures and thinking modes. The finding is of pedagogical significance for English tense-aspect teaching in China.