It has been argued that the ba-construction is a challenging structure for non-native learners. Despite the rich literature on its linguistic analyses and its learning and teaching, there have been few corpus studies on the construction. The current study examines and compares the use of the ba-construction in the QQK Corpus of learners and the BCC Corpus of native speakers. Interestingly, we found that the ba-construction appeared more frequently in the learner corpus than in the native speakers’ corpus. Learners’ avoidance of the ba-construction as claimed in the literature seemed to be restricted to certain structures. It has been found that learners of different native languages produced incorrect ba-constructions at different rates. We argue that the language distance between learners’ native language and Chinese might have played a role. In comparison with native speakers, learners also exhibited different preferences in the choice of NP types and VP types. We conclude by exemplifying a range of error types in the use of the ba-construction found in the QQK corpus.