How to use 说到 properly?

[stevenjac]

I have multiple questions regarding how I can use 说到 properly.

 

The first question is where does "him" go in the sentence "I talked to him about tasty snacks" when translated into Chinese? 

More specifically, does it go after 说到 or grouped together with the subject?

我说到你关于好吃的小卖

我跟你说到关于好吃的小卖

 

The second question is can collective nouns (e.g. we, my family) be used with 说到?

We talked about tasty snacks

我们说到好吃的小卖

My family talked about tasty snacks

我的家挺说到好吃的小卖

 

Lastly, how can you negate 说到? 不说到 or 说不到?

[WenLei-William]

Hi Stevenjac,

 

For your first question, your second example is correct, and the first sentence is logically incorrect. 

 

Since you are talking with "him", "him" should be grouped together with you, since you two are talking together. So in this case example one is correct.

In Chinese, whenever you are directly doing, going to do, or have done something with somebody, you group yourself together with that somebody, and then the actions you are doing come after that. 说到 is not an exception to this rule.

 

我跟小华去公园。

 

昨天，我和爸爸做公交车回家。

 

坐在摇椅的老奶奶与我谈及往年之事。

 

In all of these examples, the subject and object are placed together, followed by the action they are doing.

 

 

For your second question, yes, you can use collective nouns with 说到. Like in English, this this means that all the people in the collective were talking about whatever matter.

 

For the last question, you would use 说不到, but in a non-literary context such as daily conversation you could use 没说到.

 

Lastly, since your specific example is kind of informal, maybe using 聊到 or 闲聊到 would be a bit more fitting

 

This excerpt from ( https://zhidao.baidu.com/question/77378332.html ) explains a little bit about the uses of 说到:

 

现代汉语中也常见“说到”的用法。“说到”是一个动补式合成词。“到”表示一种结果。“说到”有“说及”的意思，后面往往是说及的对象或内容，或者用于“某某说到什么时间、地点”的语境中。“说到”后面一般不能有语音停顿，书面上不加标点。如：

我们刚才还说到你。

他说到这里，停顿了一下。

“谈到、讲到……”的用法可以此类推。

 

Apart from this, I would recommend mastering the sentence structure of more and more complex sentences, especially how prepositions are formed (such as "with"), to get a better understanding.

[889]

And as for negation, note that colloquially at least you'd normally put 没 before 跟, if you're using it. So it would be 我还没跟他说到 。 。 。 。