huoxu women yinggai jiao bob yingwen pinfa xian 
Tolerate=忍受/容忍 (renshou/rongren)
ambiguity=模稜兩可 (mo ling liang ke)
danshi ruguo ni ba tamen liang ge fang zai yiqi de hua, mei you ren hui kan de dong de.
(但是如果你把它們兩個放在一起的話,沒有人會看的懂的.)
qishi bob ni bu yinggai rongren mo ling liang ke. jiu yizhi wen wen dao dong.
(其實bob你不應該"容忍模稜兩可". 就一直問問到懂.)
haiyou, yinggai shi “zenme yong zhongwen jian…?” zenme yao zai qianmian yingwei ta shi yi ge wenti.
(還有, 應該是’怎麼用中文講…?" . 怎麼應該在前面因為它是一個問題.)—>this one is a bit strange I’ll admit but ask your wife if she can come up with a better way of saying it.
Incidently, ni shuo ni jiao sheme? :bouncy:
O and B - Wo juede ni haolihai. (I feel you are very special.) Keshi wo taitai shuo ninde zhongwen wenfa hao lan. Ta ting bu dong. But my wife says your grammar is really bad.)
Wo xiang wo zhidao ninde yisi raner. (I think I know your meaning however.) Wo bu yingai gaosu wode xuesheng renshou moling liangke yinwei wo de gongzuo shi gei tamen qingqu de jieshi. (I shouldn’t tell them to tolerate ambiquity because my job is to give clear explanations.)
Keshi wo juede wode xuesheng fenxi taiduo. (But I feel my students analyze too much.) Wo juede tamen yinggai yong bi jiao ziran de banfa. (I feel they should use a more natural method). Tebie shi deng tamen ziji xuede de shihou. (Especially when they are studying on their own.)
Wo de minsi shi bob.
bob- tell her I said thanks. I take it as a compliment. :bouncy:
oh, by the way, ‘raner(however; 然而)’ should never be in the end of a sentence. But I’m sure your wife will tell you that. :bouncy:
Xie xie ni. Wo taitai zhende buxihuan jiao wo zhongwen. Ta shi fanyi suoyi ta jueda wode zhongwen nema lan. Ta shi Taiwan ren. Quguo ta shi wode xuesheng. Ni xihuan chuangzao dianying ma? Chin kan “open forum”.
I’m not an idiot bob :bouncy:
“Ta shi fanyi”? Do you mean “Ta zuo fanyi” or “Ta shi fanyizhe”? Or something else?
Also, “juede” not “jueda”, “name” not “nema”, “qing” not “chin”. And that should be “yiqian” not “quguo”.
Ta zuo fanyi. Xie xie ni laoshi. Wode pinfa jinbu hao kuai o!
‘native speaker’ is ‘母語人士’
Dui bu qi. Wo kan bu dong zhonguo zi. Zhi zhidao pinyin.
Ah, well… I remember back when I was illiterate… English, too…
I need help translating the following sentence into pinyin:
Natural language learning requires the ability to distinguish between things and concepts (the past and the future for example) and then to associate words with those distinctions.
Thanks. 
[quote=“bob”]I need help translating the following sentence into pinyin:
Natural language learning requires the ability to distinguish between things and concepts (the past and the future for example) and then to associate words with those distinctions.
Thanks. [/quote]
HUGE DISCLAIMER: I am NOT a native speaker**
Here’s a try:
“Yao xuEhao YI zhong ZiraN yuyaN de* Hua, xuESHENG BiXU nenGGou QUFen ButonG de* DONGXI Han GaiNian (biFANG SHUO, guOQu Han WeilaI shIJIAN), Bingqie XUYao Yong cI laI biaodA ZheXIE QUbiE.”
(I’ve taken some liberty on the exact wording: mine is more like – “For a student to be able to learn a natural language, s/he must be able to distinguish different things and concepts (for example, past and future time), and must use words to express these distinctions.”
HTH, maybe some of the natives can clean it up some. 
Xie xie ni laoshi!
bob,
Whenever you translate into Chinese, always try to paraphrase the English first, and think about how you would express your idea in English to someone with very limited English.
In my experience this is one of the skills that many good interpreters have, even if they are not aware of it. They are able to go beyond the words and express the meaning simply. It might help you to use your Chinese to its fullest and express some pretty complicated ideas using simple language. Anyway, it seems to work for me lots of times when I really don’t know the right words. 
O.K. thanks I’ll try that.
In case you are curious, that sentence was taken from a little essay I wrote in which I try to encourage my students to spend more time watching movies in English. Basically I am comparing the experience to the experience that a child has learning a language. Children watch AND listen intently and for long periods of time. Slowly they start making distinctions between things (between self and other for -another - example) and then they start associating words with those things. With massive amounts of experience and practice these distinctions and associations become the very fabric of his mind. This is possible with absolutely no formal study of grammar. I am not discouraging my students from grammar study but I do want them to understand that there are other ways and that without lots of real life experience their English will be severely stunted for lots of reasons.
Anyway I am going more and more and more by a Chinese proverb I read awhile ago “Tell me, and I’ll forget. Show me and I may remember for awhile. But involve me and I will understand.”
I guess I just like trying to translate! Cheers.
I think you’re absolutely right about the direction. The only hitch might be that the input they are getting may not be comprehensible to them. The brain needs to understand what it is hearing before it can acquire a language, which is why pure movie-watching doesn’t do it (as a sole activity) for most people, and why many people who live in-country for a long time never do master the local language, despite being exposed to it and having a desire to learn.
Movie and TV watching has been a great help in ‘natural language learning’ for a number of Taiwanese people I have met. They had already had a fair amount of formal teaching beforehand though. I agree with what Ironlady said. Exposure alone is not enough. The material has to be roughly comprehensible. For small children learning their first languages, there are a lot of mediating factors that help in comprehension. People talk to them in simplified language and meaning is negotiated. Storybooks for small children have simple structures, a limited range of vocabulary and lots of repetition.
I wrote in this post
[forumosa.com/taiwan/viewtopic.ph … 571#205571](Tips for learning Chinese (Part I)
that;
“While there are many questions which can be raised about Krashen’s theories, surely most teachers and language learners would agree that mere exposure to L2, with insufficient modulation of the material to enable comprehension, is at best an inefficient teaching method and at worst completely ineffective and disheartening.”
I think the key point there is that the material needs to be rendered comprehensible (though surely not fully analyzed!) in some way. I couldn’t agree more. What I am trying to do is get them to make more full use of context for this. With DVD you can also make use of the repeat function and the English and Chinese subtitles. Before class everyone is assigned the same movie and I ask them to write down the answers to a few questions about plot etc. and the vocabulary that THEY think will be useful or that they think they have seen before but still have questions about. I make the same sort of list. We bring the answers and the list to class and this becomes the material for that day. We present it using a game that I designed which helps to create mind maps between different words and expressions. Don’t worry I don’t sit them down to watch a movie and call it a class!