Chinese "Conversational Connectors"

[CrassPip]

Some of you might be familiar with an ebook out there called Language Hacking Guide by "the Irish polyglot", purporting to bring a new student up to fluency in a few months. One of the excellent take aways from his materials is that it's beneficial to start talking to native speakers right away.

To aid a person with limited vocabulary in maintaining a conversation, he has the idea of conversational connectors. These are short phrases in a number of categories like agreeing/disagreeing, apologizing, changing the subject, etc.

Here is a link to his write up and it has an excel file with examples in Czech.

http://www.fluentin3months.com/conversational-connectors-how-to-fake-having-a-conversation-just-after-starting-to-learn-a-language/

My question is: does anyone have such a list for Chinese? It would seem extremely useful as early vocabulary to learn for speaking.

I'd love it if someone with the aptitude would translate his list (with substitutions where sensible).

Any thoughts?

[anonymoose]

I think it's an effective way to make your speech sound a lot more fluent and natural than it really is. But you have to be careful that you don't end up with a few overused phrases. Of course, someone listening to you for the first time will be very impressed, but after a while, if you keep repeating yourself, you risk sounding stupid.

I once knew a guy who admitedly had fairly good Chinese, for a westerner anyway, but only about half of what he said had any meaningful content, the rest just being these so-called "connectors". Every couple of sentences he would say 话说回来 and it irritated me no end.

[Gharial]

I recall seeing an appendix (at the moment of writing, a part unfortunately not previewable in the Google Books limited preview) of phrases for Chinese, Russian, and Spanish in Nattinger & DeCarrico's Lexical Phrases in Language Teaching, but it probably wasn't comprehensive enough* to be more than a start, and you could at a pinch start compiling your own lists by drawing on decent courses, phrasebooks, or dictionaries anyway; then, there is also the caution that Anonymoose advises us to think about! (I suppose in terms of the well-known ELT fluency-accuracy dichotomy, one mustn't confuse mere fluency/"empty phrases" with accuracy/actual communicative lexical content!).

*For what it's worth, one phrasebook-like book that's quite impressed me with its range of topics and phrases is DHC's 中国話会話とっさのひとこと辞典 (Dictionary of Chinese for Unexpected Situations), but unless you can also read Japanese reasonably well, you'd perhaps also need the original 英会話とっさのひとこと辞典 (Dictionary of English for Unexpected Situations) to help you find your way around the J-C edition. (The J-C edition does however have an index that lists all the Chinese translations of the phrases according to the Pinyin of primarily their first syllable/character - see the 'Look Inside' feature available on Amazon Japan: http://www.amazon.co...5/dp/4887241860 ).