Firstly this is a bit of a naughty post so apologies.
I know that my understanding of English grammar is poor and as an English teacher I am taking steps to improve upon this. However I am sick of getting owned by Taiwanese people when I can’t explain why we use X preposition instead of Y etc etc.
As a native speaker I believe that we just acquire this grammar so it is hard to explain. I just know when something doesn’t sound right.
I would like a good example of something similar in the Chinese language to use against these smug people. So my response could be something like this “ok, yes I don’t know how to explain that. However on another note please could you tell me why in Chinese …”.
I was thinking about the “le” 了 particle or using le with 過.
My wife said that if I could speak Taiwanese this would be great as native Taiwanese speakers just aquire this and most of them can’t tell you which tone to use.
The use of ‘le’ would probably be a good example except that native Chinese speakers usually don’t see that there is any problem with the use. They think it is self-evident and can’t understand why such an intuitive use would need a rule. For those so minded, this leads to the conclusion that non-han are somehow inherently incapable of learning Chinese. You are asking the wrong questions. This is never going to work. Just use the same tactic. Frustrating as it may be, the rules for prepositions, such as they are, are never going to help most learners.
I think you’ll just end of shooting yourself in the foot; people who usually think they are hot shit because they memorized a grammar rule are usually the same people who will say Mandarin doesn’t have grammar. If I were you, I’d just talk quickly using words they won’t understand (slang for example) and act like you know what you are talking about. Then you could tell them their grammar rules are wrong with some nice examples (’‘grammars rules’’ are not absolute) and if you want to be a big ass, suggest they study real English. That’ll be the end of the one-up-men-ship (sp?). If you are talking about students, just change the subject. Leave the grammar rules to the Taiwanese teachers; that’s all they can teach.
At a certain level, no one has a comprehensive explanation for the rules that govern their language, not even professional linguists who spend lifetimes trying to find out what those rules are. Eventually, anyone who studies languages has to concede that we appeal to social conventions to explain many unique structures of any one given language, and they nowadays explore neuroscience to explain why languages have any similarities at all.
The most that I do, now, when I teach grammar, is show people how to take long, impenetrable sentences, and parse them into manageable chunks. Students really respond well to it, because it feels like they’re getting a very general rule (and indirectly, they are), but they’re not being bogged down by the jargon, which I can introduce after they successfully target the areas to chunk.
While I’m a minority view in this forum about the value of grammar instruction, if you’re going to jump into it, I would start with a comparative note on the closed word classes (CWC’s) of the language. Figure out what makes pro-forms, interrogatives, etc. so unique.
I have an example of this dealing with complement phrases as arguments in sentences. In English, doing this trick is harder. In Mandarin, it’s easier, but they deceptively resemble the interrogative form. Thus, Mandarin speakers say things like this:
“What are you doing?” (你在做什麽？)
“I don’t know what are you doing.” (我不知道你在做什麽。)
“I don’t know what you are doing.” (我不知道你在做什麽。)
If you challenge them on this level (for some reason which eludes me), they often don’t have an answer for why they’re different. You and they just need to recognize how they are different.
If the OP wants to promote non-communiation and make people feel like they’re inadequate, for an average person, simply mentioning most of the technical terms ehopi likes to use will do the trick nicely. “What? You don’t even know what a pro form is? And you say you know English?” No need to even get into Mandarin if you don’t want to. Just make out like the grammar they know is only baby grammar, and the REAL grammar uses arcane labels that no one has ever heard of. (Check that the person you want to bother doesn’t have an MA in Linguistics first, though, just in case.)
I assume you use your own sentences as examples . Seriously, how do they do that during a conversation?[/quote]
They do it by coming to me with readings that they don’t confidently understand. When the sentences are particularly long or have other uncommon features, I usually ask them if there’s any particular area where it’s most difficult.
If it’s just one word or minute phrase, I can explain it and check if they understand it better. When the vocabulary isn’t the issue, I usually parse the sentence for them, and then show them how sub-sentences go into creating the initial sentence. When the chunks are small enough (that is, when they understand all of the sub-sentences which went into the composition of the longer sentence), I can stop, and they can put together the meaning of the longer sentence.
I show them the things that they should target when they’re reading alone, and they read similarly difficult sentences with greater success.
I don’t use this stuff for verbal conversations.
The real grammar will probably use arcane labels that no one has even coined yet.
But yeah, don’t use grammatical knowledge for dick measuring in the classroom, Mikybar. Formal grammars are nice for explanations when they’re more efficient than prose would be (If they wanted to hear a long talk about how it works, they would have just read the 600-page grammar book in the first place and come to you with questions about what the grammar book is saying.).
@ ehophi - I apologise, I didn’t realise that you were only referring to your students’ reading skills. The discourse analysis stuff you’re doing probably helps with that.
It’s not my cup of tea, but I’m sure there’s a big market in Taiwan for it.
In answer to the OP, I’d suggest the 把 (ba) construction. The use of it is governed by a set of rules that aren’t easy to explain if you learned it as a first language in childhood.
. Seriously, how do they do that during a conversation?
