Sentence Pattern Question

[Carrie]

Hi,

 

Just a quick question from me about the correct sentence pattern for saying you ate something at a certain meal time. 

 

For example, would you write:

我每天早餐吃煎鸡蛋。or  我每天吃煎鸡蛋的早餐。 

 

Also, to change this statement from I eat to I ate, which would be the correct structure?

 

我早上吃了煎鸡蛋 or 我早上吃煎鸡蛋了。 

 

Thanks for any help! I'm finding getting the sentence structure in the correct order one of the hardest things to get my head around. It's not too easy to guess either. 

[Carl Chen]

To my understanding,

 

我每天早餐都吃煎蛋 or 我每天早上都吃煎蛋 (煎蛋 is OK, we know that is 煎雞蛋)

 

我每天吃煎雞蛋的早餐....sounds a little bit odd, but understandable

 

However,

to be honest, i seldom heard someone said 煎雞蛋

because we usually use 蛋餅, 荷包蛋, 夾蛋吐司 to say.

 

For example,

我每天早上都吃蛋餅,

我每天早餐都吃荷包蛋,

我每天早上都吃夾蛋吐司

 

-------------------------

 

我早上吃了煎雞蛋 may imply you want to eat something else

For example, 我早上吃了煎雞蛋,還吃了熱狗....

 

我早上吃煎雞蛋了 may imply you had enough.

[Carrie]

Hi Carl,

 

Thanks for your answer. In the second case, how would I then go about writing or saying "This morning, I ate fried eggs for breakfast."

[Nathan Mao]

Carrie,

Chinese structure usually puts the linguistic items of greatest emphasis at the beginning and end of the sentence.  I agree with Carl that 我每天吃煎鸡蛋的早餐 does sound a little strange, but I can think of some situations where you want to emphasize the 煎鸡蛋 character of your breakfast, and in those situations, it wouldn't be as strange.  Maybe more strange that a person would want to emphasize the 煎鸡蛋 nature of your breakfast in the first place. The lesson here being that every modification in Chinese has an implied 的, and all the 的s are dropped except the one that emphasizes the main word.

 

So I'd like to emphasize, while there certainly are grammar structure variations that are right or wrong, other times there are variations that aren't grammatically wrong but seem strange in most situations.  So as you listen to people talk in Chines (live, or in TV shows) pay extra attention to the two placement positions of the 了, and see if you can't get a better intuitive understanding of the difference in implication based on the location.

[Carl Chen]

RE #3

 

I would say 我今天早餐吃荷包蛋