Punctuation

[TheWind]

I've never really read much about punctuation in any text book. But bilingual native speakers will often comment on my punctuation. 

Having not read much about it, i just stick with English punctuation as you may expect. I guess it works for short texts, but It'd look pretty messy if I were to write a paragraph I imagine. 

Where does everyone learn about punctuation from? or what are the rules? 

[DavyJonesLocker]

The main ones I come across which differ from English are

《》 for titles of movies, books etc

、for lists e.g. 苹果、橙子、香蕉？(however it's A, B, C     not      A, B and C)

 ‧  for non Chinese names e.g. 威廉 ‧ 莎士比亚 (William Shakespeare)

。for full stops

 

The rest are fullwidth spaces like ，instead of , and (which I find somewhat off putting visually). Once you set your keyboard to chinese, it will take care of itself though. I select the option for the English halfwidth though. 

I have seen one like 「 ...」for quotes but I think that is for traditional text (unsure) 

 

 

The only other two comments I think is worth mentioning are

(a) in Chinese I always feel like they omit commas (，) when to me, if included, would make comprehension a lot easier!

(b) things like …… (6 dots for a ellipses by pressing SHIFT+6 on a chinese keyboard) are useful but if you can't find it, you end up not bothering

 

The way I learnt is just by looking at my textbooks and taking it from there. 

 

(For ref I use 搜狗 keyboard but I think Google Pinyin has the same shortcuts)

 

 

[大块头]

50 minutes ago, DavyJonesLocker said:

、for lists e.g. 苹果、橙子、香蕉？(however it's A, B, C     not      A, B and C)

 

This varies though depending on who you ask, right? It's like how not everyone uses the Oxford comma in English.

 

For example, I've definitely seen people write things like

 

Quote

我喜欢苹果、橙子和香蕉。

 

Edit: This post seems like a really good resource for punctuation rules.

[DavyJonesLocker]

6 hours ago, 大块头 said:

For example, I've definitely seen people write things like

 

Quote

我喜欢苹果、橙子和香蕉。

 

 

 

Thanks, I probably have too actually now that you mention! I'm not sure what's the the accepted standard is for Chinese. 

[agewisdom]

Actually, just to comment on this topic...

 

How do you guys actually approach Chinese texts that don't have punctuation? Because, I just realized that a lot of these texts can have radically different meanings depending on where you place the [imaginary] punctuation such as the comma. Or is it more from guessing at the entire context of the paragraph? Seriously, how does one pick up this skill apart from through a repetitive trial and error process?