Chinese Ordered English

[trevelyan]

Just ran into this and am curious what others think about it as a pedagogical method:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese-Ordered_English

[roddy]

Scurfield's Teach Yourself Chinese uses this, giving the COE version next to colloquial English for translations of dialogues (if I remember correctly, long time since I've used the book). I think it's great for getting a sense of how the language works, without having to actually worry about what the words mean.

[Gulao]

This is also the rough grammatical form of a certain variant of "Chinglish," a pidgin spoken primarily by native speakers of Chinese amongst themselves in an imitation of English. It's often unintelligible to native English speakers, but native Chinese speakers have little trouble parsing it.

There is a variation among native English speakers while speaking an imitation of Chinese amongst themselves, with much the same circumstances as the Chinese variant.

The second is a great deal of fun to speak, even if it is utterly useless.

[pattifranklin]

I don't think that this is the greatest thing created to help english speakers learn Chinese. Yes, it would help students to learn the basic grammar and sentence structures, but I don't think anyone can shy away from putting their nose to a book an studying. I couldn't see this being used for more than a few weeks in a beginning Chinese class.

[teachinator]

I don't know if COE will help English speakers learn Chinese or not, but as an English teacher who teaches Chinese people I find it very interesting to read this and it certainly makes some of my students' English look familiar :-). I'm creating a seminar (or a course; not sure how long it will get!) to help introduce American teachers to some of the pitfalls of teaching Chinese speakers, and this will be a useful resource to help them understand why their Chinese students form sentences the way they do. Thanks for posting it.

[querido]

I strongly favor this, and used it another language (I'm a beginner in Chinese).

A colloquial translation offers an English that is easier to read, which is help that I don't need, at the cost of obscuring the Chinese!

Think about this: Figuring out what the Chinese means, without reordering it, and using the powerful language tools you already have, *is* learning Chinese grammar. (This is analogous to learning Chinese pronunciation using a romanization: it is "real" Chinese pronunciation you're learning, despite the help from familiar characters.) Otherwise, you're facing the need to learn Chinese first, in order to learn Chinese grammar in Chinese? That doesn't make sense.

This idea taken to the extreme would lead to being able to speak English using Chinese grammar, then just plugging in the Chinese words as you learn them. Again, this is analogous to first reading pinyin, then plugging in the characters as you learn them.

And I can tell you, from experience, what this feels like, because I did it to some extent in Russian. It feels like merging the new language into your own, and speaking one, bigger, language.

I'm talking about doing this on your own, not about any particular book.

[zozzen]

It may help beginners quite a bit , but i don't think it's a good way to learn a dramatically different language in the long run. It involves too many steps to reorganizing the sentences and can't help learners to respond quickly.

我今天剛巧有空, 跟你吃飯吧. 你想吃甚麼菜?

I today just have "free", with you eat dinner, you want eat what cuisine?

don't you think it's too complicated?

[querido]

quote

It involves too many steps to reorganizing the sentences

end quote

You *don't* reorganize them.

Having someone else reorganize the sentence for you *hides* the grammar rule, and creates a dependency. The ultimate goal is to hear or read a string of characters and not have to reorganize them (either on paper or mentally) in order to understand.

quote

and can't help learners to respond quickly.

endquote

The learner does not need to respond quickly. Later, after he knows the words and has ingrained the grammar, he will respond quickly, because he won't have to reorder everything before understanding it.

quote

我今天剛巧有空, 跟你吃飯吧. 你想吃甚麼菜?

I today just have "free", with you eat dinner, you want eat what cuisine?

don't you think it's too complicated?

end quote

It is complicated. And figuring it out is *learning* chinese grammar. Presumably the student is learning these characters. Well, very quickly he will just skim the characters and not bother with the translation, right? That is the goal. But reorganizing it now hides the grammar, and that student will not be able to do that.

(Also, any course would start out with simpler sentences than the example you gave.)

This is the way I think about it.

End.

[zozzen]

querido, do you know any material that uses COE to teach chinese? I'd like to know more how teachers use this method to teach chinese.

[querido]

quote

querido, do you know any material that uses COE to teach chinese?

end quote

no

quote

I'd like to know more how teachers use this method to teach chinese.

end quote

I don't know how it would be done in a classroom.

As I said above, for me (learning on my own) it seems natural. Also, I said I was a beginner. I am only describing what makes sense to me.

There are simpler examples of how colloquial translations hide the Chinese, but the thread was talking about grammar, I think. But I'll give an example: I'm glad I went through the process of figuring out why it makes sense to form the compound word eastwest (dongxi), and what it means, instead of just accepting the translation "thing". There are hundreds? or thousands? of others, like biglittle (daxiao), etc. The colloquial translation hides this interesting Chinese compound word forming mechanism.

[chinlearner83]

Wow, I'd much rather just learn the Chinese in Chinese. It's only somewhat fun to go back and change the Chinese to Chinese-English to show your friends/family what your brain has to do to understand Chinese (not that it really has to do that). Of course, if you keep the English without inflection, etc. it makes it sound as though Chinese is without good grammar. The original Chinese is grammatical. A translated version would be grammatical, but this isn't. I think this has applications, but they're not that widespread.

[zozzen]

chinlearner83, i think COE is only for a very beginner like querido. COE can tell us how to put an adverb, verb-to-be and some basic grammar elements in Chinese sentence. But normal learners should acquire these grammatical knowledge in a short time, and that's why many Chinese textbooks don't use this method. If there's a complicated sentence, then the better way is to have translations word by word instead of making an odd COE.

[chinlearner83]

Yes, I know. I think it's a useful analytical tool; nevertheless, I don't think it would be good for most beginners of Chinese. Of course, everyone's different. Actually, anything to prevent reading one character at a time.

[hlk123]

Assimil, P.Kantor, "Chinese with Ease" 1 & 2.

Thru the COE lines I can see/learn that Chinese sentence:

- is subjectless

- topic-comment

- without "if"

- context-oriented

- etc.

The COE lines help me at the beginning very much.

The COE or "literal English translation" is used by Yip's Chinese Grammar books... and by Li / Thompson.