This may sound like a silly question but.....

[tismeau]

How do you tell when the characters are making up a word? In English the spacing tells you that you have a new word, looking at one of the readers I bought the spacing between the characters is consistent and I am having problems with working out words.

Here is the first sentence of the reader:

明明和真真一起不见了。

Which characters combine to form words? How do I tell?

I am completing classes through my local Confucius institute (have finished the beginner classes) and head back next month for more classes, trying to get a head start.

[imron]

Unfortunately the only real way is through practice. You need to build up a vocabulary, and also be familiar with general sentence and grammatical patterns, and then apply those things as you read.

At first it can be tricky to do, so you need to keep an eye out while you are reading and if something doesn't seem to make sense or seems strange then you've possibly parsed the sentence incorrectly (especially keep an eye out for names, which can throw you for a loop if you don't realise it's a name), then you can go back and trying splitting it a different way. Over time this gets easier and easier to do correctly.

For reference, I would split the sentence you posted as follows:

明明 和 真真 一起 不见了

Here, 明明 and 真真 are both names.

[liuzhou]

Not a silly question at all.

As imron says, it takes practice.

[roddy]

I deal with a lot of translations which deal with developing nations - 发展中国家 (development - in the process / middle of - nations)。 I used to quite often stumble over this as I'd parse it as (develop-China-hang on, this doesn't seem right).

[johnk]

I was recently reading about how to split Chinese sentences into words by means of a computer program. link

Apparently it's not easy. :-)

[tismeau]

Thanks guys. Reader, notepad and pen are ready for me to learn. :-)

[tooironic]

As usual, imron has already provided some fantastic advice.

You may also find annotation tools like MandarinSpot useful. They can automatically parse Chinese words for you, and show a mouse-over definition.

[Cat Jones]

Chinese names always throw me in a sentence!

[count_zero]

Sometimes if you paste a short sentence into nciku.com it will identify the individual words - sometimes, and quite annoyingly, it will not. I don't have time today to compare nciku to the other two links above for splitting up words in a sentence. Maybe at the weekend.

Sometimes putting a sentence into good old Google translate can show you where you are slipping up. I find numbers in Chinese can be confusing "一大二男" One big two? The trick with that one is that 大二 is the second year of university.

[creamyhorror]

The trick with that one is that 大二 is the second year of university.

Then why isn't the fifth year of primary (elementary) school 小五, like it is over here? (The tutors I spoke to online didn't understand the term, at least.) The mainland is funny.

[andysun731]

Chinese is sometimes too flexible, even for locals, when a sentence can be split in different ways to express different meanings.

[jbradfor]

Are there some "standard" examples of Chinese sentences that can be understood in two (or more) different ways, depending on how the sentence is parsed into words?

[skylee]

Something similar.

可以清心也。

以清心也可。

清心也可以。

心也可以清。

也可以清心。

[andysun731]

To jbradfor:

有粮食不卖给八路军吃

有粮食 不卖给八路军吃

有粮食不卖 给八路军吃

[imron]

And my favourite, 小心地滑

[jbradfor]

Thanks for those, but I'm not sure that's quite what I was after.

I translate andysun's example as

[There is] food [so we can] sell to the army to eat

[There is] food we can't sell, so give it to the army to eat

Is that close?

If so, that feels more like a difference in how you parse words into clauses, similar to English

She's got freckles on her; but I love her

She's got freckles on her butt; I love her

[Which doesn't work well written due to the difference in spelling, but works spoken]

imron's example feels to me more ambiguous (or poorly phrased), more like "runaway truck ramp" or "giant sofa sale" or "slow children"

What I'm looking for is examples of parsing the characters into words in different ways with different meaning; there is no analogy in (written) English, since English is already parsed into words (by spaces), although one could think of an example in spoke English.

[i like skylee's "poem", but she knew it wasn't quite what I was looking for]

[skylee]

I googled 斷句笑話 and found this http://www.ccmedu.com/blog/u/1655/archives/2008/20086514059.html

You can find many examples in there. Such as -

“此屋安能居住其人好不悲伤” -> “此屋安能居住，其人好不悲伤。” or “此屋安，能居住，其人好，不悲伤。”

“女人没有她男人什么也不是” -> “女人，没有她男人，什么也不是。” or “女人，没有她，男人什么也不是。”

[andysun731]

有粮食 不卖给八路军吃:We have food, but we don't want to sell the food to army to eat.

有粮食不卖 给八路军吃:We have food which we don't sell, but we give them to army to eat.