Problems on speaking and creating sentences

[lockdoc]

So I am now at a stage with is really frustrating me.

When I speak to people I can understand most of what they talk, basically I get their meaning or their question.

I can hear out all the keywords and now exactly what is going on.

BUT: I would not be able to repeat their sentence as I cannot understand it word by word, I am also missing little prepositions or something like this.

So when I then try to reply I have all the words in my mind to tell them, but I am having difficulty to put them into a proper sentence.

I most of the time just do not know how to connect all those words into a whole sentence due to lack of grammar structures or similar.

A practical example would be: I learned the word 招呼 which translates in my voc list to: "to greet/to call out"

In the text I saw the usage of it with 打招呼 which also confuses me.

I would have no idea how to say "I am greeting him" would it be "我招呼他" or "我打招呼他"

This is just an example how i find it really difficult to actually apply the words that I have learned.

So my basic question is: How can I overcome this problem? I should really be able to speak now at my current level, but somehow it does not work out and this drives me crazy.

Any advice?

[anonymoose]

I think it's better rather than to learn individual words, to learn phrases.

So taking your example, you should learn 和（person）打招呼. If you learn as much vocabulary as possible like this, it will make for much smoother speaking in the future. And as you become more confident and develop a feeling for the language, you will naturally be able to use these phrases more flexibly.

[jbradfor]

That is (one of my) problem as well, and I would be interested in solutions. In addition, I've found that I don't know a lot of "linking clauses" that are used to make sentences. For example, a couple weeks ago I realized that I didn't know how to say "maybe in the future [i will]". [it's 将来 .]

I think what the OP was asking is not how to use that particular word, but as an example of the general problem.

There was a post last month that discussed a way of reusing vocabulary in different ways. That context was in learning a new word, but I think this approach would work for what you describe as well, learning how to phrase things quickly and correctly.

[Gharial]

I think it's often helpful to make a distinction between a notion in the abstract versus the extent to which that notion actually finds functional expression; that is, not every item in a dictionary is absolutely essential in everyday speech, or may be subtly altered in the course of "its" expression. Often dictionaries simply aren't detailed enough to do things justice in productive (especially speaking) rather than simply receptive terms.

Taking then the example of (打)招呼 and just its primary meaning of 'greet, say hello to', to be honest my first thought was, has enough if any real thought/meaning/context/function been assigned to those rather decontextualized-sounding "target" sentences like 'I am greeting him'...with my rapidly-following second thought being that I'd personally be much more interested in hearing or expressing that somebody hadn't greeted me or somebody else. On the sheet of paper that I then started to draw a "mindmap" of sorts on, I therefore noted 'not greet', also thought of and noted the informal, very snappy and concise, and apparently Britsh English 'to blank somebody' (which unfortunately drew a blank LOL in the E-C dictionaries I own, though those who have bilingualized [E-E-C] editions of advanced EFL learner dictionaries such as the LDOCE may have better luck: http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/blank_3 ), and lastly flirted briefly with 'ignore' before a lack of examples for it brought me back to '(not) greet'/(打)招呼 again. [Obviously, thesauruses and thesaurus-like works such as the Oxford Concise/Paperback Thesaurus, and the bilingualized versions of the Oxford Wordfinder and Longman Lexicon can be of use here. (By the way, does anyone know if Longman have translated any of their Activator range yet? Their simple A-Z format would sure be a lot easier to use than their Roget-like, conceptually-arranged Lexicon, which necessitates two look-ups, the first in an A-Z index, which then directs to a coded section in the alphabetically-jumbled main body of that Lexicon)].

Fred Fangyu Wang's venerable Mandarin Chinese Dictionary: Chinese-English is IMHO a treasure trove of examples pretty representative of speech, and once again it didn't disappoint with its example(s), which as a bonus seemed to confirm my instincts (what can I say, maybe I'm a frustrated lexicographer!): 打招呼 (VO, i.e. Verb-Object structure): 他看見我沒跟我打招呼; 招呼 (TV, i.e. Transitive Verb): 他看見我了，可是沒招呼. (The companion E-C volume from Wang is generally less useful BTW). Then of course there are as 欧博思 recommends (oops now in post #5 below) the examples at sites such as nciku (though not all of them will roll off the tongue quite as readily as Wang's do). The guide to 'Parts of Speech' in Wang is very helpful in making clear the constructional processes involved with each lexical item chosen: for example, the following part of the VO section will help clarify the code and example given above for 打招呼:

 

A verb-object structure can never take another object. To show the relation with another noun, either a co-verb is used with the noun or the noun is used between the VO, as in gēn tā jiéhūn 跟他結婚 marry her; shēng wǒde qì 生我的氣 mad at me.

Getting back to the functional-notional level (i.e. a more top-down than bottom-up level), it would seem to me that the area of 'greetings' is probably better represented by those phrases we all learn and know such as 'Ni hao!', 'Zaoshang hao!' etc, than by reporting the action/verb 'greet' itself (unless that reporting can be communicatively justified in e.g. the above context of somebody not greeting us or returning our greeting, a fact which we might with some justification find a little unusual or upsetting, hence our desire to remark on it in conversation later, and all as opposed to the sheer ubiquity and banality almost of saying that we greeted somebody or that they greeted us).

If my approach seems lexicography- and syllabus-design-oriented, that's only because I'm speaking more as an EFL teacher interested in those areas, than as a "full-on" learner of Chinese...though I suspect that the difference between the serious teacher and serious learner may not be that large ultimately. (Certainly, it can often seem as if there is no real option but to identify good-quality materials and more or less teach oneself a lot of things, the empirical and functional basics, when many so-called teachers are little more than barely-qualified, vaguely-experienced, time-wasting "method" merchants!). I guess a good way to summarize this approach would be to call it a search for "killer" examples (though with very high-frequency words, quantity, in order to reveal whole ranges of structures, and allied to recycling etc, is just as important as quality!).

[歐博思]

I didn't know the rule about not posting all in Chinese so my post was deleted, but I still want to help you so I am posting again. You should go to a website that uses vocab in context. My favorite website for this is www.nciku.com ~ highly recommended.

[Gharial]

(By the way, does anyone know if Longman have translated any of their Activator range yet? Their simple A-Z format would sure be a lot easier to use than their Roget-like, conceptually-arranged Lexicon, which necessitates two look-ups, the first in an A-Z index, which then directs to a coded section in the alphabetically-jumbled main body of that Lexicon)

 

a-HA! http://www.pearson.com.hk/index.php?section=59&page=book&book_id=282

[ithinktoo]

I think it's better rather than to learn individual words, to learn phrases.

 

 

I want to expand on what this person was saying.  This is a fundemental concept of language learning.  Your can learn the meaning of a whole sentence without learing the specific meaning of the component words.  And you should learn this way.  Take for example this english phrase: "he's taking a break."  Does knowing all the ways you can use the word 'break' contribute to the meaning of the phrase?  Not really.  Better to leave the associating the words to other phrases you know to your subconcious.  Focus your attention on siturations you can use that phrase.

[Gharial]

Does knowing all the ways you can use the word 'break' contribute to the meaning of the phrase?

 

Well, yes, in that the most common and prototypical meaning of the noun use is "a period of time in which you stop for a while", while the verb usually means something like "to damage" or "to end", though there is of course an area of overlap: Shall we (have/take a short) break for lunch now? ("delexicalized" other verb + the noun use, vs. the verb use).

 

But perhaps also No, in that one may like you say perhaps come to at least subconscious realizations from simply meeting the phrases and without explicitly analyzing them much. It might be better if the phrases concerned were a little more idiomatic than literal though.