Practicing pidgin Chinese

Language Learning Chinese
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I have a rudimentary knowledge of some basic Chinese grammar and vocabulary, and practice by speaking into Google Translate a sequence of strung-together nouns and particles, finally checking the translated English output for plausibility.

Here’s an example “sentence” (and I use the word loosely) that I was able to form in this way based on my own rudimentary knowledge:

我的戶籍在這裡申請書沒問題嗎

If I spoke that sentence to someone in Taiwan, do you think they would understand what I meant? Google gives a correct translation of my intent when I speak this sentence, but I wonder if a native speaker would also understand.

And how would you correct the sentence to be more grammatically-correct, colloquial Chinese?

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First of all, what are you trying to say?

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Google translates my pidgin Chinese into this fairly understandable English:

The context of this query would be when negotiating a rental contract with a landlord, most of whom apparently do not want you to register your rental address as your household-registration address; although by law, they must allow it, it seems that many will get upset if you actually try it. Therefore, my idea would be (when the time comes) to use pidgin Chinese to ask the landlord if it is OK to register my household-registration address as this address.

I suppose it would be better to somehow insert the word 這個地址 into the sentence. I would imagine the sentence would look something like this, but it’s lacking some important grammatical structures that I don’t yet know how to use.

我的戶籍, 做這個地址申請處沒問題嗎

This gets translated by Google to be “My household registration, is it okay to apply to this address?”, which seems somewhat clearer in English, but probably the Chinese is still botched.

Of course, I could just ask Google translate to spit out a reasonable Chinese translation for my original English question, but that’s not the point of my exercise here; instead, I’m trying to stumble along using the words and structures that I know, and to discover what essential meaning-carrying structures and words I am missing (and hence need to learn) when I try to formulate my own sentences.

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If you got rid of the 書 it would be fine.

Though that’s only for Taiwan citizens, you wouldn’t apply for household registration otherwise.

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5

means application form. you might want to say just apply or register.

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我可以把戶籍遷到這裡嗎？

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Thanks; the corrections and suggestions were helpful.

Next topic: expressing “can/cannot”. I tried translating these two sentences in Google translate and got slightly different sentence structures.

I cannot write zhuyin → 我不會寫注音

I am familiar with this pattern, “不會” + verb.

On the other hand:

I cannot read zhuyin → 我看不懂注音

I am not familiar with this pattern, which seems to be stating the verb first (看) followed by not understanding (不懂).

Are both of these sentences correct? Why are the sentence patterns different? I suppose the first sentence (cannot write) is saying “I have no ability whatsoever to perform the activity of writing zhuyin”, but the second sentence (cannot read) is more like saying “I have the ability to visually see the zhuyin characters but cannot ‘understand’ them”. By that logic, if you are physically unable to see something (due to it being obscured, or having eyesight problems), in that case could you say “我不會看” ?

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Yes.

Why is the sky blue?

No, it would be 看不見 or 看不到.

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No. They will probably ask you a question for clarification.

For me the sentence could either be
我的戶籍寫在這。申請書這樣寫有問題嗎？
or
我的戶籍申請書放在這可以嗎？

If you want to write: Is it okay to apply for my household registration here, it is more common to say:
戶籍是在這裡申請嗎？
是在這邊申請戶籍嗎？

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The scattering of light caused by tiny air molecules (known as Rayleigh scattering) increases as the wavelength of light decreases. Violet and blue light have the shortest wavelengths of visible light and red light has the longest. Therefore, blue light is scattered more than red light and the sky appears blue during the day.

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Just like @tando to take a rhetorical question literally. :sweat_smile:

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These aren’t the ideas he’s trying to express. Read his later post.

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I see, then it should be:
我可以用這個地址申請戶籍嗎？

In that case the standard answer would be: If you want to do that the rent would be 10 to 20% higher.

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Very nice. I just thought of a simple way to remember this: infrared and ultraviolet. Infrared → below red → lower than red in frequency → lower frequency means higher wavelength. Ultraviolet → above violet → higher than violet in frequency → higher frequency means shorter wavelength.

Hm, need to think about that some more to understand it. Electromagnetics is cool stuff…

Back on topic, I’m a firm believer that there must be some logic to any grammatical pattern (unless it’s a purely one-off exception, in which case an arbitrary logic can be invented to explain it).

I notice the similarity in pattern between 看不懂, 看不見, 看不到, and 聽不懂, so I continue to think there is some logic behind this kind of construction (different than the logic that underlies 不會寫 or other 不會+verb expressions) that I just haven’t grasped yet. At least now I know to be on the lookout for this pattern.

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This kind of pattern is very common in Mandarin.

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I may need to go to a Taipei household registration office (HHR office) to try and get some documents.

Does anyone have any experience here in dealing with the HHR office (or other government offices) using smartphone translation apps like Google Translate, where both you and the other party take turns speaking into your smartphone’s microphone in English and Chinese, and the app then recognizes the speech and translates it into the other language?

This requires that the other party be mildly tech-savvy, as in knowing how to operate a smartphone, knowing to speak when the app beeps, and knowing that you need to speak clearly and slowly into the app for it to translate correctly.

I was just wondering if anyone has any direct experience with how accommodating the HHR office people are, for visitors who have only very limited Chinese ability.

At some point I would need to ask the clerk at the office to speak into the translation app. In pidgin Chinese, that might be something like the following (while pointing to my phone and the translation app):

對不起, 我聽不懂。 請你使用中英翻成用APP好嗎?

Any comments on this pidgin Chinese?

From a pidgin-language communications perspective, it’s probably best to stick to short sentences, and to first state the meaning-carrying words (“translation app”) before the rest of the sentence (“could you please use”), so maybe a better word order would be:

對不起, 我聽不懂。 這是中英翻成用APP。 請你使用APP好嗎?

(In practice, I would prepare some Chinese-language sentences, printed on a sheet of paper, explaining clearly what I need to do and what supporting documentation I have brought. Hopefully by pointing at the paper, most of the interaction could be done with minimal speaking.)

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Staying close to your original sentence structure:
對不起，我沒聽懂。請你用中翻英的APP好嗎？

People here don’t understand app as a word, only as separate letters

A bit more colloquial
抱歉，我沒聽懂。可以用google translate嗎？

That one is perfectly comprehensible, even if it’s a bit long and formal.

I think most likely there would be someone capable of basic English communication to help you out though. So you might only get a few Mandarin sentences in until they go bring that helpful person out.

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This.

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I recently learned from my textbook the useful-sounding phrase 不一定. A couple of questions on its use. Would the following sentences be understood, and correct?

他去不去不一定 – It’s not certain whether he’s going or not.

我買不買不一定 – It’s not certain whether I’ll buy it or not.

他是不是陳先生不一定 – It’s not certain whether or not he is Mr. Chen.

我懂不懂不一定 – It’s not certain whether or not I understand. (I am not sure if I understand, or not.) Maybe this would better be said as “我懂不懂不知道”? Or is that also odd-sounding?

Thoughts?

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Do you not have a girlfriend to throw these at and get some feedback?