The Difficulty of Chinese Grammar

[mtpastille]

Proposition: It is easier for a native English speaker to piece together grammatically correct sentence in Chinese than it is for a Chinese person in English.

I met a Chinese person today who spoke excellent English. She had lived in the US for many years and had a slight Chinese accent but spoke fluently. However, I noticed that she kept making minor grammatical mistakes, like leaving out articles sometimes.

I don't consider myself fluent in Chinese, but I do consider grammar to be my strong suit. I can say a word that's inappropriate in the context, or mispronounce a word, but I don't think that I make grammatical mistakes all that often. In contrast, back when I could have a conversation in French, I thought French grammar was horrible. My gut feeling leads me to believe that Chinese grammar is simply easier.

Granted, learning Chinese comes with lots of pitfalls: characters, tones, chengyu, pronunciation... the list goes on. But am I right in saying that it's just plain simpler to say a grammatically correct sentence in Chinese than it is in English? If true, does this mean that high-level second language speakers of Chinese generally make less grammatical mistakes than their Chinese counterparts?

[anonymoose]

Possibly, but it's difficult to quantify, and it's also subjective. I don't know what your native language is, but myself, as a native English speaker, found french grammar fairly easy to master. In fact, the main difficulty I find with french is remembering all the various verb forms, rather than where to actually put words in a sentence.

I agree that Chinese is relatively easy in that it has few prepositions and the like which can complicate a language. On the other hand, I think Chinese also has some subtleties which are hard to master fully, for example the nuances of using 了.

[mtpastille]

Right, French word order isn't all that difficult. I was mostly referring to all of the conjugations and irregularities. My native language is Swedish, which is related to both English and French to varying degrees. I agree that there are a few tricky bits, like 了 and 着, but they seem less daunting than what English has.

[Ruben von Zwack]

I find Chinese make some mistakes that have nothing to do with how difficult or complicated English is, for example, like mixing up he/she when in a very lively discussion. This is obviously not difficult, I wouldn't even call it "grammar" - but apparently you have to have it hard-wired into your brain from an early age on. They make the same mistake in German, but at the same time, they master complicated things in German grammar (like conjugating adjectives according to the gender and number of the noun) very well.

Conversely, I'm sure every foreign learner will always just be making one or another mistake in Chinese, word order or whatever, that give away their background.

[WestTexas]

I think this is called fossilization.

Basically, there are some grammar mistakes that will never go away for most speakers.

The he/she thing is one example. I teach English here, and many students make this mistake. They know perfectly well it's wrong, but the part of their brain that matches concepts to words isn't wired quite right for making the distinction when speaking. However, I find that better students do not make this particular mistake

To me, the difficulty in Chinese grammar isn't one of following rules, it's more the problem of making natural-sounding sentences, which I suppose isn't exactly a grammar problem. You can make plenty of grammatically correct Chinese sentences that still sound odd to native Chinese speakers, though they won't be able to tell you why.

Another difficulty with Chinese grammar, for me, is that you can't really improve your speaking grammar by reading because spoken and written Chinese, even in perfectly standard Mandarin, are very different. You can watch TV or talk to people, but if you just concentrate on reading, you will end up with an oddly bookish and unnatural way of speaking (this has happened to me).

Now, English has, in my opinion, better teaching materials. Like I have a book on my desk now, the Longman English Grammar, that was written by a team of linguists based on extensive analysis of a 30-million-word corpus. It delineates the exact differences in conversational English and various written registers and uses real examples instead of the idealized, fakey sentences most grammar books contain. The book contains bar graphs of things like, for example, which conjunctions are used more in conversational and academic English. Chinese, to my knowledge, lacks a similar resource. A lot of Chinese grammar books also focus too much on relatively uncommon grammatical patterns but only briefly touch on sentence-final particles like 呢 or 呀, which are far more useful and more common. There is also a curious lack of information in many grammar books on function words from classical Chinese like 所　or 以. Instead, they try to tell beginning students that the way you ask where someone is from in Chinese is 你是从哪儿来的?, a phrase I've never heard a Chinese person say despite having been asked where I'm from by probably a thousand Chinese people.

[Guest realmayo]

My gut feeling is that the OP is right. English gives even a fairly advanced learner lots of opportunities to make a small grammatical mistake.

Meanwhile my hunch is that Chinese provides even a fairly advanced learner with lots of opportunities to make odd-sounding choices in word/phrase usage.

[Steingletscher]

I'm still not exactly sure what constitutes as grammar in Chinese as opposed to English. English's morphology is clearly part of grammar, but is Chinese's merely part of word-choice and not grammatical at all? By morphology in Chinese, I'm referring to the rules that govern the usage and creation of character combinations. Overall, the grammar of the two are very different.

If you include punctuation and the way sentences should be laid out in good writing, then Chinese is still very difficult in terms of grammar. Perhaps I'm not to far into Chinese, but I have noticed that the way ideas can be structured in a sentence is very different in Chinese then in English. The biggest problem I've seen in reading English writings of length by Chinese people who have not studied overseas is the run-on sentences that convey multiple ideas (and often because they are included in one sentences, imply a sense of connection that wasn't meant). Sure, the individual clauses were mostly grammatically correct, but the way they were strung together was not. For those really advance learners of Chinese, do you have problems with writing in Chinese clearly and grammatically correct lengthy sentences?

I find at a beginner lever much of Chinese grammar, especially syntax, feels like a very simplified form of English (excluding the semantics of the characters). The problem is, how to simplify when going from English to Chinese in a way that still feels native and natural.

[WestTexas]

I suppose the basics are easy enough, but in my opinion, there are some serious gaps in the teaching material for intermediate and higher-level stuff. When can I use 和、跟、与、同、or 及? Why does that adjective get a 于 after it and this one doesn't? Why am I 在Ｘ中 but 在Ｙ里　or 在Z上? And then I can be 在Ｗ, with no follow-up preposition at all. Also, I want a list of every single use of 以 and 而. A big list of clause-level conjunctions and their registers/slight differences would be nice too.

The real solution is obviously to read a lot and spend a lot of time talking to people, but there are still widespread problems in the Chinese teaching materials in my opinion.

At the end of the day, though, English is probably more complex grammatically. 99% of native speakers might not realize it, but English grammar is very hairy and intricate on many levels.

[mtpastille]

While we're on the topic of structuring sentences in Chinese, are there any books about this? I know that in English there are style guides such as the (nowadays mostly disliked?) Strunk & White, written for native English speakers who need to polish their writing skills. What about style guides in Chinese? I've always found the run-on sentences in Chinese extra perplexing. They are obviously not run-on sentences, but rather the idiomatic way of expression.

[Angelina]

Look for titles in the 修辞学 section.

[Don_Horhe]

'Expressions of Written Chinese' by Feng Shengli and 'Speaking Chinese: 300 Grammatical Points' by Cao Shan are both very good for polishing your grammar/syntax, although they can get quite technical.

[tooironic]

As a fluent speaker of Chinese whose first language is English, my gut reaction was to agree with the OP that it is easier for Chinese learners to string together a grammatically correct sentence in Chinese than it is for English learners in English. But now I'm not so sure.

I think it's possible that some of us are slightly biased on this, and not just because we are native speakers of English, but rather because we simply may have encountered more non-native speakers of English in our lifetimes than non-native speakers of Mandarin. Thus our impression of poor English is quite clear in our mind - no doubt mass media plays a role in this as well - but our impression of poor Chinese is not that developed. As for the Chinese learners we have come across, we may be unable to critique their grammar, since the nuances of Chinese grammar can be subtle to say the least.

For me, it's only been in the past year or so that I've been exposed to more non-native learners of Chinese in their beginning and intermediate stages of learning. Here's a brief summary of the mistakes I've noticed they make (and I'm sure there are more than this, since I am no expert):

- Misuse of 了 (usually because they haven't taken the time to learn how it is used properly, or they mistake it for a "past tense" marker).

- Inappropriate or unnatural collocations (固定搭配), e.g. using 还是 instead of 或者, 经历 instead of 经验, 因此 instead of 从而, 打算 instead of 安排, 在乎 instead of 在意, etc.

- Problems with register (语域) - i.e. mixing formal (书面语) and informal (口语) language together.

- Problems with prosody (I guess it's called 韵律 in Chinese). This is quite a significant issue, since it can make the language hard to understand. It comes about most commonly when deciding when to use one or two character words, and how they connect naturally with the rest of the sentence (hard to improve though, except by exposing oneself more and more to native-level material).

- Interference from their first language - e.g. expressing oneself in open, English style sentences, which usually sounds awkward in a language which prefers absolute statements, or conjunctions in ways which are acceptable in English but not Chinese (e.g. over-use of 转折结构), being indirect or polite when direct or familiar would be more appropriate, etc.

- Using 个 for every measure word (not a big deal by any measure, but reveals a certain lack of language level it must be said).

Anyway, very much of this can be attributed to a lack of 语感 - i.e. a lack of "language sense", a lack of feel for the language, brought about by a lack of language input, or a lack of friends who speak to you daily in the language.

What I discovered upon preparing for the grammar part of the HSK 6 exam is that the majority of what are considered grammar mistakes in Chinese are very subtle. In many cases still, the mistakes are more related to word choice or logic than what Westerners would term grammar mistakes per se. And these mistakes went totally beyond the descriptions in the major Chinese grammar books, of which I've read almost every one.

OK, seems I wrote quite a lot. I'm a weird person in that I find grammar interesting. I find the OP's question rather interesting as well. Look forward to hearing more responses from other users. Interesting that our veterans Roddy, Skylee, Imron and Kenny haven't chipped in yet...

[skylee]

I can't. I don't know Chinese grammar. I am not even a fluent speaker of Putonghua (or any languages other than Cantonese).

[gato]

While we're on the topic of structuring sentences in Chinese, are there any books about this? I know that in English there are style guides such as the (nowadays mostly disliked?) Strunk & White, written for native English speakers who need to polish their writing skills. What about style guides in Chinese?

Modern written English has already had several hundred years of history, whereas modern written Chinese has less than 100 years of history, so it makes sense that there is nothing like Strunk & White's "Elements of Style" for Chinese yet.

But nevertheless, these two books by 叶圣陶 on writing are pretty good:

http://www.amazon.cn/%E8%B7%9F%E5%A4%A7%E5%B8%88%E5%AD%A6%E8%AF%AD%E6%96%87-%E6%80%8E%E6%A0%B7%E5%86%99%E4%BD%9C-%E5%8F%B6%E5%9C%A3%E9%99%B6/dp/B0011C2XMY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1374633865&sr=8-1&keywords=%E5%86%99%E4%BD%9C

跟大师学语文:怎样写作

http://www.amazon.cn/%E8%B7%9F%E5%A4%A7%E5%B8%88%E5%AD%A6%E8%AF%AD%E6%96%87-%E6%96%87%E7%AB%A0%E8%AE%B2%E8%AF%9D-%E5%A4%8F%E4%B8%8F%E5%B0%8A/dp/product-description/B0011C2XRO/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&s=books

跟大师学语文:文章讲话

~ 夏丏尊 (作者), 叶圣陶 (作者)

[linguaholic]

First of all I would like to say that my mother tongue is German. I have been studying Chinese for a few years and I would definitely say that Chinese Grammar is easier than German Grammar. But, as some people already mentioned, it is really hard to "measure" or to compare the difficulty of the grammar of two different languages. In my opinion, learning German for Chinese is at least as difficult as learning Chinese for Germans (or Swiss people).

I know many Chinese in Switzerland and in Germany and honestly, most of them are not fluent in speaking and they are really really struggling with the grammar and writing in general.