Tips for translating English to Chinese

[pprendeville]

I'm using Boya Chinese elementary 2 here in Minzu uni. I can read the dialogues after going over them a few times quite well and understand them thoroughly. However if I have to translate a sentence contained in the dialogue from English to Chinese I find it difficult with the word order. Is there a good way of approaching this or is it just a matter of becoming familiar with structures and something that comes with time and practice?

[abcdefg]

Word order is something that non-native speakers, such as you and me, have to think about when speaking and writing in order to get it right.

Learning the rules of grammar and syntax, as you are doing with the Boya textbooks, obviously helps. What I've found as I've progressed is that most of the time now I just can tell whether the Chinese sentence "sounds right" without even thinking about why or having to formally analyze its structure.

But I still occasionally make mistakes and probably will for a long time to come. Sometimes I say or write a sentence that I think is just fine, but a Chinese friend will rephrase it, and then I realize their version actually does sound more natural.

I have friends, here and back in the US, who were born abroad but have spoken English at a very high level of proficiency for decades, and they still sometimes say something that sounds just a tiny bit "off" or just a tiny bit "foreign." I doubt that ever completely goes away, at least not without a truly Herculean effort.