Stuck in my English grammar ways - 语法的问题

[TheWind]

Hello everyone. 

 

I've always struggled with Chinese grammar, I didn't how I was saying it versus the Chinese, but just today a Chinese native had informed me of this.

"i found the problem of your grammar is English-Ordered Chinese, especially prepositions and the punctuation."

 

Now that I know my problem. Have you fellow language learners had similar problems? Tips on overcoming them?  

All help is appreciated. 

[eion_padraig]

I'd recommend you check out the edX intermediate Mandarin grammar course. it's free and if you're at HSK 3, it should be a manageable course for you.

Also, how much do you read in Chinese. Reading graded readers could do a lot to help you see native sentence structure.

These two things along with working with a tutor one on one have helped me a lot with these types of issues.

Eion

[roddy]

And do some practices in slower, less-stressful situations than real conversations. Maybe one of those '300 Sentence Structure' books might help.

 

Are these errors you yourself can spot if you think about it afterwards?

[TheWind]

roddy

Posted 5 minutes ago

And do some practices in slower, less-stressful situations than real conversations. Maybe one of those '300 Sentence Structure' books might help.

 

Are these errors you yourself can spot if you think about it afterwards?

 

Some of them I might realise  moments later. for example, this one problem I only just got a handle on, concerning "before" and "after"

 

I would usually say something like 以后我们吃饭。。。。the way we do in English but now I'm starting to get use to the placement of 我们吃饭以后。。。

 

 

[TheWind]

Oh, and I read a fair amount of Chinese, through various sources. books, chatting with natives via WeChat, articles

[boctulus]

You should start "thinking in chinese", that's the only way to speak better but also do things faster and natural.

 

Of course, you need to reach some experience.

[The_]

.

[TheWind]

I was hoping for maybe an outstanding book suggestion, that focuses on grammar. Websites could help too. 

@boctulus, I actually already do that a lot of the time. but the consistent problem is that I'm putting in English order without knowing it. 

[Shelley]

I made a lot of progress when I changed my method of reading and translating. Have a look at my topic Preserving word order http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/50055-preserving-word-order/

 

It helps a lot with "thinking in chinese".

[The_]

.

[Gharial]

I would usually say something like 以后我们吃饭。。。。the way we do in English but now I'm starting to get use to the placement of 我们吃饭以后。。。

 

Not sure if you're aware of this (apologies if you are), but Chinese can have 以后 initially, e.g. 以后谁来了? and 以后我们去看电影, it's just that it then means 'afterwards, later on, full stop' (i.e. is an adverb rather than a preposition [postposition?] or conjunction, cf. 后来 (but see last para)) than 'after event A...(something else, B, happened)'.

 

Which could be a case for getting more rather than less stuck into English ('Afterwards, we ate' versus 'After we ate...' versus 'We ate after...wards?' LOL) and whatever similarities between the languages than necessarily the differences.

 

If you're wondering what I'm basing the above on, it's just the grammar information and examples found in good dictionaries like the Oxford Chinese Minidictionary (Yuan & Church, 2001), and Fred Fangyu Wang's venerable Mandarin Chinese Dictionary: Chinese-English (Dover Publications 2002 reprint of the 1967 Seton Hall UP original) and ~ : English-Chinese (2002/1971), hell, *BONUS* he even literally underlines in the former that 后来 is "used for past events" (i.e. ~ only). I can't think of any other dictionary that bothers to explicitly point that important fact out! Usually one needs to crack out grammar tomes like Hung-nin Samuel Cheung et al's A Practical Chinese Grammar (which in the relevant section on pp450-451 has, besides kosher examples, also contrasting, ill-formed~"impossible" examples such as *这件事等后来再谈吧, *他以前学法语，以后学英语，都没学好, and *我吃饭后来来看你) to find even such basic facts out or to establish them beyond doubt.

[Zeppa]

I think you need to give more details of what exactly 'English-Ordered Chinese, especially prepositions and the punctuation' means to your native speaker of Chinese. That sounds like a very narrow area of word order. And punctuation obviously refers to your writing, or are you referring to speaking too? See if you can get more specific comments. Just working through a grammar course may not hit the right spot.

 

I like Hugh Grigg's Chinese Grammar Notes. They aren't complete though:

http://www.ctcfl.ox.ac.uk/Lang%20work/Grammar%20database/Grammar_database_content.htm

[Eliot]

I used to have this problem as well.  My philosophy is: if you want to stop thinking in English when you try to speak Chinese, stop using English when you study Chinese.

 

Years ago I learned new words with front/back Chinese/English flashcards.  I was able to memorize a ton of new words (especially with software like Anki), but at the end of the day I was just learning their English definitions and I wasn't learning how to use them appropriately in Chinese sentences.

 

Eventually I switched to "massive context cloze deletions" made popular by a blogger named Khatz on his website "All Japanese All the Time."  (relevant link: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/12-free-mcd-examples).  I was no longer studying the English definition of new words, but rather I was studying how the new words fit into real Chinese source material.

 

This did wonders for my ability to create native-sounding sentences.  It felt weird, at first, studying like this, because I instinctively wanted to know and be able to recall the English definition of any given answer.  But "letting go" of the need to know an English definition for everything during my studying ultimately made me a better Chinese communicator.

[TheWind]

@Zeppa and for anyone else interested, here are a couple examples of my writing. It's from an online journal where natives can correct your mistakes. Needless to say, I've already gotten many corrections from them. This was in fact where I was told about my English-ordered Chinese grammar problem as well. 

1st entry
今天我决定了开始写在日志。我希望活的有主的建议，因为我的最大的问题是语法。写这个日志应该可能容易如果我有很多的东西写哪。但是只要我正在练习就我可能改善我的语法的问题。

今天我说跟两个新的人（谢谢对 Italki) 第一个人是我的老师。我们复习了NPCR2 书，我感觉这个可能太容易对我，但是我的老师是还好。我的上课完了以后，然后我有聊天跟其他的新的人。 他两个月上刚才开始学英语，所以他的英语比一些其他的人不太好。可是他很刺激学英语跟我。

Thanks for any and all help =D
 

2nd entry

今天是我的最后一个天假期所以明天我得回去工作 （想哭）.尽管我明天必须回去我还好开心因为我可以练习我的汉语。

 

大部分你们谁正在读这个可能不认识我干什么。我会告诉你们我是英语老师所以我教我的母语。大部分我的学生很聪敏可是我还有偷懒地学生。他们不从想来学校。我的同学也聪明除了我们的接待员以外大部分我中国的同学还会说英语。
thanks for reading & your comments in advance.

 

 

I understand my punctuation problem. I put periods and commas at similar places I would in English. Unfortunately, I've never read or been taught one thing about punctuation in Chinese, besides #1 they don't use spacing (or not much) and #2 their periods look different. That's really all I've got to go off of, so it's not that much by itself. 

[Zeppa]

Eliot, are you just advertising yourself? How helpful is that?

[imron]

@Zeppa, I'm pretty sure Eliot is not Khatzumodo.  He's just a new user who isn't quite up to speed on how we run the forums, but I'm sure he'll get there (that post of mine was made after he had posted in this thread).

[Zeppa]

@imron: sorry, I thought you were referring to another thread.

[Eliot]

@Zeppa, my apologies for coming off as advertisey.  I've never been much of a forum user, but now that I'm here I see there are lots of interesting threads with topics that I'd genuinely like to participate in.  To whatever reasonable extent that I can, I'll keep my advice separate from my other projects.

[朱真明]

Get this book

http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Patterns-Chinese-Grammar-Structures/dp/1933330899/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1455661580&sr=1-1&keywords=chinese+grammar

It usually gives the correct sentence structure in comparison with the incorrect one English speakers usually make. It is quite illuminating.

[Zeppa]

Sorry, Eliot, I mistook you for someone different!