Unknown grammar and a reading question

[winterpromise31]

Hopefully this will be a quick question.  I'm participating in the June reading challenge, at least 30 minutes per day. It's going pretty well, though I'm realizing just how many holes I have in my vocab and grammar knowledge. But I have a general study question. Sometimes I "read" a sentence and realize I know every single word and yet I have no idea what's being said. 

 

An example phrase - 至少十次

I know every word but it took me awhile to figure out what it meant as a whole. I looked at it and saw "to arrive few 10 times." Ok, that makes no sense. I finally was able to locate a definition that told me this was saying "at least 10 times" but it took quite a bit of searching. Is there an easier way to look up grammar? This is just one example of many where I know the words or I know individual hanzi meanings but can't figure out what the phrase or sentence is saying. 

 

A second question - is it worth looking up everything I don't know or to keep plowing forward with my reading practice and then study grammar on the side? I finished an online course and haven't yet started anything new. I was thinking I'd start here - http://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/B1_grammar_points

I know some of these grammar points but there are a lot in this list I don't know. Would that be enough to keep me busy for awhile or would it be better to buy one of the textbooks referenced on that page? 

[Demonic_Duck]

Word boundaries in Chinese are less clear-cut than most languages (in fact, even in a language like English they're mainly just a matter of convention). However, it's often useful to think of very common combinations of characters as word units rather than simply the sum of their parts. In the case of “至少”, you can make a good case that it's actually two words, with “至” meaning “最” rather than “到”, and this is backed up by other similar constructions (“至多”、“至高”、“至上”、“至爱” etc.); however, if you haven't come across those other constructions, it can also be useful to simply think of it as a single word, with the meaning "at least".

 

I know every word but it took me a_while to figure out what it meant as a whole.

 

I would dispute this. I'd say you knew at least one possible meaning for every character (with each character arguably constituting its own word, as noted above); however, you didn't know the meaning for “至” as it was being used here, i.e. “最”.

 

There's really no shortcut here; if you find you don't know a phrase, you need to break it down into plausible chunks and see what you're missing. In this case, either looking up “至” or “至少” in any decent word-dictionary would provide you with the correct understanding. For more complex grammatical constructions, you might want to consult a specialised grammar book, ask a friend with good Chinese, or simply ask about it here.

[anonymoose]

You don't know all the words. 至少 is a word, meaning "at least". If you knew that, you would have understood straight away.

 

The key is to learn words, and not just individual characters.

 

As for whether you look up every word, different people have different opinions. I would tend towards looking up every word, especially if building vocabulary is a priority. And incidentally, I think your problem here is a vocabulary problem, not a grammar problem.

[imron]

I agree with the above.  You didn't know all the words, you knew all the characters.  It's like in English knowing the words 'up' and 'set' and trying to put them together to figure out the meaning of the word 'upset'.  Sometimes it'll work, but just as often it's not that possible and can be completely misleading e.g. something like 好容易, which has the exact opposite meaning of what you'd expect.

 

The only real way to fix the problem is through practice and the more you practice the better you'll get.

 

If you'll excuse the shameless plug, you might also find something like my Chinese Text Analyser useful.  You can open a file or copy/paste Chinese text, and it will analyse the text and split it in to words.  It doesn't always split them correctly, but it does a good enough job for general text.  It will also keep track of words you do and don't know and allows you to export word lists of unknown vocab and other things.

[Demonic_Duck]

You didn't know all the words, you knew all the characters.

 

Correction: you knew at least one meaning for all the characters. Even if you treat it as word in its own right, getting the correct meaning of “至少” in context is trivial if you know all of the common meanings of “至” and “少”.

 

Take another example:

 

“不讲信用”

 

Now, as it turns out, in this case “信用” is a single word. However, even if you don't know this word, you can probably guess the meaning of the phrase by reference to the characters alone, if you know the correct meaning of each constituent character in this context.

 

Let's say the only meanings that you know for the characters are “不” ("not"), “讲” ("to speak"), “信” ("letter") and “用” ("to use"), so you're confused ("to not speak of using letters?"). On the other hand, if you also knew that “讲” can mean "to place emphasis on", and “信” can also mean "trust", you'll probably arrive at something close to the correct meaning of the full phrase, "to be untrustworthy".

 

Basically, knowing the meaning of the words is very important, and you can't simply learn characters alone (in some cases, knowing the meaning of the constituent characters is no help at all). However, it helps to have a solid understanding of the common meanings of common characters, and this can often help you make educated guesses as to what they mean in compounds.

[Lu]

is it worth looking up everything I don't know or to keep plowing forward with my reading practice and then study grammar on the side?

I think at this point, and with this amount of reading (half an hour a day), it's worth looking up everything and learn all the words you then understand the meaning of.

[889]

Do you mentally "read aloud" the characters? It's easier to recognise something like 至少十次 if your mind is also hearing zhishao shi ci.

[winterpromise31]

Thanks for the advice! I'm suspecting part of my frustration stems from my experience with hanzi/kanji. I studied Japanese for two years and completed Heisig's Remember the Kanji. Because I'm learning to read traditional Chinese, RTK has worked wonders for my hanzi familiarity. However, it's giving me a false sense of how much I know. It probably doesn't help that the first premade Anki deck I downloaded and completed was single characters that they called "words." I'm now learning two or three character words that were in that deck as single characters and getting frustrated at the discrepancies. 

 

I will check out the Text Analyser. I'll continue reading and look up what I don't know, throwing it into Anki. Between repetition this week (I'm intentionally only reading one specific blog to get a feel for her voice and vocabulary choice) and Anki, I'm learning a lot. I feel like I'm trying to drink out of a fire hose, though. There's so much I don't know and so much I need to learn that it's overwhelming. And yes, I do read aloud in my head (thanks for pointing out the use of that). I'm studying about an hour a day total, half hour being the reading practice. The other half hour is completing my Anki decks and looking up grammar (or trying to! like I said, I'm struggling to look up individual grammar points). 

[Lu]

I feel like I'm trying to drink out of a fire hose, though.

Focus on keeping hydrated then, not on drinking all the water from the hose.

[winterpromise31]

 

Focus on keeping hydrated then, not on drinking all the water from the hose. 

 

LOL. It's hard not to feel overwhelmed.

[Demonic_Duck]

Assuming you're not doing this already, have you considered switching to specifically graded material (e.g. "The Chairman's Bao" or similar) for your allotted time?

[winterpromise31]

Are there graded materials which were originally written for Chinese speakers? I was warned against reading things written for learners, as it tends to be stilted, unnatural sounding writing. 

[heifeng]

Here is my quick & dirty recommendation for native materials: 

1. pick news you enjoy reading.

2. read 1 short paragraph (Or 1-3 sentences) if you are a beginner, or longer as your level/patience allows. Figure out how much you understand and words you are not sure about.

3. Plug & chug words, sentences, or article here into MDBG translation here For the WORD DEFINITIONS AT THE BOTTOM--Refer to Screen Capture (NOT the auto translation function) or use Imron's recommendation above.

4. Scroll through words and definitions to see if this helps you to assemble the meaning better.

5. As you read more you will 1. increase vocab and 2. know how to anticipate/understand meaning of Chinese words in certain context. ( Also, your "passive" familiarity will grow, but you may want to practice writing words you see frequently.)

 

This way you can see where you were not sure of the "words" vs "characters" as pointed out above. Of course in the case of MGBD it is not always correct at auto assembling the word groups, but as you become more advance you will be able to identify this more frequenty

 

Example below which may superficially appear difficult but actually is just a matter of vocabulary and about a practical topic. Source:  World Journal

 

不洗手就戴 當心角膜潰爛

 

新研究發現，使用隱形眼鏡的人，眼睛有的細菌種類與不用隱形眼鏡者不同，包括含有與角膜潰瘍有關的細菌。該研究再次提醒我們，手不洗就戴鏡片，或是戴著鏡片睡覺是很危險的作法。

紐約大學朗格醫學中心進行一項小型研究，9名使用隱形眼鏡者和11名不用者的眼睛被擦拭取樣。研究員審視這些人眼睛所含的細菌種類，結果發現用隱形眼鏡者，4種細菌較多：乳酸菌（Lactobacillus）、不動桿菌（Acinetobacter）、甲基桿菌（Methylobacterium）和綠膿桿菌（Pseudomonas），而後者經常與角膜潰瘍有......朗格醫院的眼科教授多迪克指出，自從1970年代引進軟性隱形眼鏡以來，角膜潰瘍就增加。由於造成潰瘍的微生物似乎來自皮膚，所以眼瞼和手的衛生應多注意。

3招護眼 免受感染

●先洗手再洗眼鏡：碰觸隱形眼鏡前，先用肥皂洗手。再把鏡片放在乾淨的手掌上，澆上清潔液，輕柔地把清潔液揉擦進鏡片，如此就可去除有害的污垢和細菌。（雖然清潔液的瓶子會註明：不要揉擦，但是經過揉擦，你的鏡片比較衛生。）

●考慮不同的隱形眼鏡：醫生認為日拋式軟性隱形眼鏡，是可避免這些問題的好方法。每天用一對新眼鏡，能沾上鏡片的污垢和細菌不會太多。如果你不是勤於清眼鏡的人，日拋式隱形眼鏡很適合你。

●暫停配戴隱形眼鏡：想避免眼睛紅或更嚴重視力問題的最好方法，是盡可能戴普通眼鏡，以限制眼睛接觸隱形眼鏡的時間。專家建議，只在工作時用隱形眼鏡，在家和周末用普通眼鏡，限制一天最多用隱形眼鏡12到14小時。

 

[Demonic_Duck]

Are there graded materials which were originally written for Chinese speakers? I was warned against reading things written for learners, as it tends to be stilted, unnatural sounding writing.

 

Graded materials originally written for Chinese speakers basically means materials originally written for Chinese kids. I guess you could also include materials about a technical subject that are written for a general audience (e.g. popular science), and concievably things such as materials intended to help illiterate adults with learning to read (though I don't know if such resources are widely available on the internet).

 

The problem with such things is that the grading needs of a 9-year-old kid, a reasonably well-educated Chinese person, an illiterate Chinese person and a foreigner will tend to be very different. With stuff like The Chairman's Bao, it seems like they carefully tailor the content to a specific HSK grade; however, this may lead to the "stilted" or "unnatural-sounding" problem you mention. It all depends on the skill of the writer, though - if the writer is very skilled at writing graded content, there's no reason in principle it should be stilted or unnatural-sounding.

[winterpromise31]

heifeng - thanks for the suggestions!! I've been using MDBG but didn't realize they had an option for translating a block of text. 

 

Demonic_Duck - I was thinking more for children. In regards to our daughter (soon to be adopted from Taiwan), we'll need to determine her English level. The translator said they'd bring her English textbook to our next Skype call so we can see what she's studying. With that knowledge, we can find children's books at her level. There are English graded readers and plenty of options for her, based on her interests and her English abilities. So I was hoping there is something similar for Chinese children, something that Chinese learners can use. 

[imron]

I was warned against reading things written for learners, as it tends to be stilted, unnatural sounding writing.

People who give this advice are usually talking about passages and dialogs in textbooks and often they do sound stilted.

 

Also, when you are still not at an advanced level of Chinese, then any longer passages of text are going to be stilted to some degree - that's just unavoidable because your Chinese isn't at a point where you can understand unstilted text.  Try reading 'Spot the Dog' or some other native English books aimed at children with small vocabularies.  They'll be stilted too.

 

The thing to realise is that these learning materials are just a stepping stone.  They aren't going to somehow lock in unstilted grammar and vocabulary.  They are going to allow you to read progressively more difficult texts, without too much struggling along the way.  I'd take a look at the Chairman's Bao and see if you find the content there suitable, and if so, keep reading it.