Chinese grammar more important in being understood

Language Learning Chinese
1

This is a personal problem I have with Chinese and I’m not sure whether it is inherent in the language or my own problem with it. It seems to me that although Chinese grammar is more simple than English grammar it is more important to get it right in order to be understood. although I occassionally forget tones of words I haven’t spoken for a while I can easily hit tones when I remember what they should be. Often when I am trying to communicate something to someone I find that they can’t understand my meaning it isn’t my tones that are the problem but that I have somehow messed up the grammar. Although people sometimes realise what I meant and correct my sentence it doesn’t seem so wholly removed from my sentence that it should have been a barrier to understanding. I often unconsciously apply English grammar rules to Chinese.

Anyway my question is, does the huge amount of homonymns in Chinese (including tones) make it in a way of saying a more rigidly contextual language in some cases? I.e. it is vital to get the grammar right otherwise people don’t have the proper contextualisation to understand what you are saying.

Is Chinese grammar simpler yet more important to get correct or is my grammar much worse than I believe it to be?

2

I don’t think it is the homonyms, because (in proper context) there is hardly ever truly a pair of homophones that would make for confusion in meaning (“buy” and “sell” being the prime exception to this rule!) If you buy a dictionary arranged by Pinyin without regard for characters (simply phonetically by what would be heard) you’ll see this. It’s one of the biggest myths that blocks people from starting to learn Chinese, IMO.

However, since Chinese is not an inflected language (it doesn’t mark who is doing the action, or when the action is being performed, using endings or prefixes or anything), it lacks the redundancy that English has. If you say “The boy go to school” people pretty much get your meaning that it’s the boy doing the action, but you’ve made a mistake. Mistakes in Chinese by foreigners tend to be things like wrong tones (which is as big for a Chinese listener as the difference between “buy” and “fly” in English) or using English grammar and plugging in Chinese words (often mispronounced to boot).

Word order is really important in Chinese, and small words make a big difference. I’m working with a particular student in Taipei now via Skype. He’s making very good progress. Right now we’re working on the relative clause in Chinese (well, on the surface, we’re figuring out how to get Chen Shuibian out of a tight spot, he having purchased a taxicab that won’t turn left, and having Michael Jackson in the back seat demanding to be taken to Taipei Main Station, but what we’re really doing is working on relative clauses, and directional verbs, and lots of other grammatical stuff… :wink: ) The difference to a new speaker of Chinese between “Chen mai le* JichenGCHE” and “Chen mai de* JichenGCHE” is very small, yet the impact on the meaning is enormous (the first being “Chen bought a taxi” and the second “The taxi that Chen bought…”). It’s something that needs to be acquired gradually. As a teacher it’s fun to watch the process, with the student getting better and better at dealing with the relative clauses that come without warning, and then celebrate on the day when it clicks in.

You’re not doing anything unusual – you’re simply doing your best to apply a set of rules that you’ve memorized to a set of words you’ve also memorized. That’s a lot of load on the brain. Usually something breaks down, or you find suddenly that you haven’t been taught the rule to take care of one particular meaning you want to express, or you forget the rule, or you mispronounce the word because you’re concentrating on the rule, or…well, there are so many possible permutations of problems with rules-and-output teaching. And when the Chinese you’ve been taught breaks down, you fall back (quite sensible and naturally) on what you do know: English.

This is why CI is a good way to go. My student is not yet ready to take a test on relative clauses (which would traditionally be taught as a grammar point in some unit or other in the book). I’m not expecting that to happen right now – it’s too early. But what will happen is that with hundreds or even thousands of exposures to relative clauses used naturally in narratives (even stupid ones which happen to amuse us at the time) his brain will acquire that structure, and one day he will just “own” it for comprehension. A little while later, it will start falling out of his mouth when he wants to express that meaning.

Tying meaning to structure (grammar) is the important thing. Otherwise it’s a long and laborious journey from a meaning to the selection of several rules to the application of those rules, trying to get them in the right order, and then output. It’s enough to make anyone speak haltingly.

3

I think that basically what I mean except a lot less eloquently put. The word order and the small words that make the difference. I think there are a few cases of the unseperable verb object combinations that I will occassionally seperate and be unable to be understood. I also see alot of Taiwanese who know 'the rule for a particular structure in English make the easiest of mistakes even though they know the rule like the back of their hand. I think rearranging sentence you want to say into a different grammar and using different words is quite the juggling act when you are doing it in a conversational setting on the fly.

4

Also on a different note in the use of Comprehensible Input for learning Chinese Is it primarily input focussed e.g. largely teacher talking and student listening? What kind of onus is on the student to produce new language themselves in a creative way? To what degree does translation play a part if any?

5

IMHO, I think using the wrong tone prevents native Chinese speakers from understanding non-native speakers more than incorrect grammar.

6

Comprehensible Input is highly input focused – that’s the point of it, after all. Students are not asked to produce speech until it happens naturally. In practice, that could mean nods and shaking of the head for the first class, until the teacher models how to answer a yes-no question (which, of course, isn’t very straightforward in Mandarin!) using the verb. After that, one-word answers to show comprehension are fine, until the answers gradually get longer. The teacher encourages longer responses by providing longer chunks of input, not by constantly demanding “complete sentences”.

This is precisely why CI and traditional methods do not mix well. Teachers who say, “I’ll do some CI and some rules-and-output teaching” are using two diametrically opposed approaches. It’s like plotting out a course for a ship based on the premise that the earth is flat and then switching to the premise that it’s round every 20 minutes, then back again. The two are that different in their philosophical underpinnings.

Since most CI methods I’m aware of are based on the creation of some sort of text by the class (“text” in the linguistic sense of a continuous piece of language, a conversation or a story), students have plenty of chance to create with the language. They simply are not expected to create using full sentences at first.

Translation is used to ensure that input is 100% comprehensible (otherwise it is not comprehensible input, it’s almost-comprehensible input…) Translation, if there is a shared language, is the quickest road to comprehension checks and clearing up questions. Grammar explanations, which are handled as quick pop-ups, are done in the shared language so as to keep them at 5 seconds or shorter.

7

There’s more finesse than grammar to Chinese. Grammar is unheard of in Chinese classes for natives, and is only a tool to help foreign learners make sense of a mostly unstructured language.

8

As usual, native speakers truly believe Chinese is unstructured. It isn’t.

I do not teach grammar directly, and I don’t believe that teaching grammar speeds up acquisition of a language, but Chinese is by no means unstructured. It has (like every language) grammar. And plenty of it. You can argue for finesse in discourse, or in the choice of words, but there’s little room for finesse or wiggling around in the grammar of the language.

9

Agree. Wrong tones, and also just plain wrong pronunciation.

My chinese is bad, my grammer is abysmal, but my pronunciation and tones are pretty good. (People are always very surprised how good my pronunciation is, and I’m not just talking about the same people who say “Your chinese is very good!”, I’m talking about people like my wife who would not bullshit me, and my chinese teacher).

I can usually get the point across if I know at least most of the words that I need, even when I KNOW I am destroying the grammer.

10

i think it’s because you’re coming from English.

My friend who is from Benin, picked up Mandarin REALLY fast. his claim to advantage? his language is tonal like Chinese. it made it tons easier.

11

First, many linguists claim that Mandarin is in transition from S V O to S O V and that creates a lot of confusion. Other linguists (fewer) claim that Mandarin is a non-morphological language; meaning that just about anything you put together that is understandable is correct.

My personal studies suggest that Mandarin is still firmly S V O and that grammar is of significant but not overwhelming importance. I do, however, agree with those who have written here that tones are probably the single most important issue.

The question of tones is NOT limited to Mandarin. English isn’t a tonal language yet, during my years living in Europe, I found many occasions when someone tried to speak English to me and there were some words I simply could not figure out what they were trying to say. Eventually it came down to a small error in their pronunciation that prevented me from recognizing the word.

12

Correct pronunciation may not be the most important thing, but it’s the easiest to drill.

13

I think grammar is more important than most native speakers or teachers think. But I also think that tones are less important than people think as well. Yes, wrong tones really grate on the ears, but they rarely really interfere with comprehension all that much. I have met several people who speak perfectly understandable Mandarin with no tones.

I think the real issue is on the intermediate level of usage. You simply cannot use words the same way as you use them in English (or other European languages). If you translate directly into Chinese, you will be incomprehensible, especially if you use the wrong word order. Add in couple of missed tones for flavor and you have a completely incomprehensible mess. Adding to the hilarity, the bemused foreign learner will start complaining that Taiwanese people are refusing to understand him even when he speaks Mandarin and insist on speaking English.

14

From my own experience, I couldn’t disagree more. I often utter a sentence and the listener will look at me like I was speaking Martian, but a native Mandarin speaking friend will say what sounds to me like exactly the same sentence (same grammar/word order but with correct tones) and the listener understands perfectly. If it’s not tones that are the problem, I don’t know what it is.

15

i was half-joking, cuz tones don’t have much to do with syntax/grammar. that said, my friend was able to pick mandarin much quicker than any english-speaker i’ve seen, a lot of it due to his ease with tones, so yes, we are talking about speaking mandarin, and not necessarily grammar competence.

certainly, you cannot transliterate from english; i still do that for some sentences and it marks me out as a non-native. e.g. adverb duo (more), I think of placement like in english, whereas in mandarin it’s “reversed”

16

From my own experience, I couldn’t disagree more. I often utter a sentence and the listener will look at me like I was speaking Martian, but a native Mandarin speaking friend will say what sounds to me like exactly the same sentence (same grammar/word order but with correct tones) and the listener understands perfectly. If it’s not tones that are the problem, I don’t know what it is.[/quote]

You say it sounds the same. My experience is that non-fluent, non-native speakers don’t hear very accurately. They think they hear the same thing, but there are usually important differences in word choice and sequence that make the difference.

Don’t get me wrong. Tones are really, really important. You should know the tone of every word you use and expect that often you will still say the wrong tone even though you know what it should be. In time (in my case a very long time), this will pay off big time. I used to think tones were the problem. Now that my tones probably 98% accurate, I am sadly aware that usage is still a problem.

17

From my own experience, I couldn’t disagree more. I often utter a sentence and the listener will look at me like I was speaking Martian, but a native Mandarin speaking friend will say what sounds to me like exactly the same sentence (same grammar/word order but with correct tones) and the listener understands perfectly. If it’s not tones that are the problem, I don’t know what it is.[/quote]

You’d be surprised. One of my students/friends is an elderly waishengren former soldier. Originally from another region, and a speaker of another dialect, virtually all of his tones are completely different from local standard Mandarin. For me, as a non-native speaker of Chinese, I find him very hard to understand. Locals, on the other hand, understand him perfectly.

18

[quote=“Feiren”]You say it sounds the same. My experience is that non-fluent, non-native speakers don’t hear very accurately. They think they hear the same thing, but there are usually important differences in word choice and sequence that make the difference.

Don’t get me wrong. Tones are really, really important. You should know the tone of every word you use and expect that often you will still say the wrong tone even though you know what it should be. In time (in my case a very long time), this will pay off big time. I used to think tones were the problem. Now that my tones probably 98% accurate, I am sadly aware that usage is still a problem.[/quote]
I am quite sure that the same “words” were used but with accurate tones. In the cases where I was misunderstood and the native speaker who then was accurately understood, the difference was tones.

I agree that if one hopes to become reasonably conversational in Chinese, attention needs to be paid to using the correct tones. From the perspective of communicating and being understood, I’d bet that proper tones will get you further than correct grammar.

19

I do - it’s called “Japanese”… :slight_smile: Just kidding - but not just kidding…
Actually, the pronunciation of Japanese (“onyomi”) nouns seems to me, statistically speaking, much closer to Minnan than to Mandarin (i hope there is someone here who knows more about the phonological history of the Chinese languages, to explain why that would be so).

About those small differences that have a big impact - i suspect that learners of a new language stumble over them because in their new language they are in different places within the structure than in their native language. To illustrate:

(Ironlady’s example from Mandarin:) “Chen mai le JichenGCHE” versus “Chen mai de JichenGCHE”
(“Chen bought a taxi” versus “The taxi that Chen bought…”)

(An example from Latin:) “Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant” versus “Ave Caesar, mortui te salutant”
(“Hail Caesar, they who are about to die salute you” vs. “Hail Caesar, they who are dead salute you”)

(An example from English:) “Give me the cheque” versus “Give me a cheque”
Japanese learners of English generally have eternal difficulties with the issue of when to use a definite article, when an indefinite article and when none at all.

And have you ever had to explain to a curious Chinese, Korean, or Japanese student how English speakers make good sense of all these strings shown below that one might encounter in a given context?
to get, to get in (two forms, one with stress on “in” and one without stress but with a prepositional object), to get in on, to get out, to get out of, to get up, to get up on, to get down, to get down on, to get down into, and so on… as well as to come, to come on, to come in, to come on in, to come in on (+ prep. obj.), to come up, to come on up, to come up on (+prep. obj.), to come down, to come on down, to come down on (+ prep. obj.) - phrasal verbs until your poor students’ heads explode. :wink:

Or, as someone once suggested to me, “it’s just a matter of having a sufficiently twisted mind”… am not inclined to argue about that… :smiley:

What i wanted to say (before i let myself get carried away playing with words) is that i think weighing pronunciation against grammar is not really useful, since both are necessary overall for effective and efficient comunication, even if we can find specific circumstances where they don’t matter much. Sure, in some situations someone may be doing fine even with poor grammar, and in other cases someone with poor pronunciation may get by without too much stress, but no rules can be derived from such anecdotal evidence (nevermind that we don’t even know anything about other factors that may help or hinder communication in each case, such as face expressions, gestures, timing, choice of communication partners, etc.) …

20

Sounds more like cognitive dissonance to me. The listener sees a foreign face and expects English, or perhaps mangled Chinese, to come out. He has shifted his mental filters to accommodate that. The brain then experiences confusion when it receives perfectly spoken Chinese input.