Sane (=not tortured by Indo-European notions) grammar of Chinese?

[imron]

8 minutes ago, Lumbering Ox said:

and I absolutely hate to hear myself speak

How often do you hear yourself speak?  You likely hate it because a) you are not used to it and b) it exposes things about your speaking that you don't like.

 

By listening to yourself speak you can solve both of those problems because a) the more you do it the more you get used to the sound of your voice and b) you can make an effort to address the problems.

[Shelley]

13 hours ago, werewitt said:

Sorry, but after reading your own admission that you've been "studying" over 10 years and barely are at intermediate level I started taking your advice, at best, as an advice on how not to study

Well if you are going to criticise me you should get your facts straight, I have been studying Chinese for 32 years (admittedly this is "over 10 years" but "over 10 years" could imply not much more than 10 years), my level is posted as intermediate because that was my last level at which I took an exam in 2010. I learn for pleasure and because chinese is my passion. I am not concerned with taking exams, I don't need chinese for work or anything else I need to be tested for, so I don't take exams regularly. My last University evening class exam was a pass at level 2A, not sure what this equates to in HSK or other systems so I approximated intermediate, it could be higher or lower, to me its not important. I only take notice of my level to assess my progress.

 

If my progress is too slow for you, then maybe you could have shared your methods or otherwise encouraged me instead of which you felt the need to criticise.

 

I do have to agree with sentiments put forward by several of the contributors to this post that maybe its you, not the fact there is no pain free way to learn chinese and chinese grammar.

 

I do wish you well in your studies and that you find a system/grammar book that you can get on with.

 

@querido To quote "Querido, I knew I could count on you"

 

[happy_hyaena]

I have a tangential question that I feel might be appropriate to raise here.

 

All of my Chinese textbooks come with an index in the front with translations for word classes: noun = 名词，verb = 动词，adjective: 形容词, 什么的. Going by the comments in this post these terms were introduce in recent times by scholars imposing Western/indo-European linguistic traditions on Chinese? Or have they alwyas been there?

[werewitt]

13 hours ago, Shelley said:

I have been studying Chinese for 32 years (admittedly this is "over 10 years" but "over 10 years" could imply not much more than 10 years), my level is posted as intermediate because that was my last level at which I took an exam in 2010.

 

Apologies, it took you not 10, but 25 years ( 32-(2017-2010)) ) of "studying Chinese" to get to an "intermediate" level (not sure what 2A means exactly, a third semester undergrad uni course for non-natives similar to https://sydney.edu.au/arts/chinese/undergrad/units_of_study.shtml?u=CHNS_2601_2012_1 maybe? Approximately HSK3-4's vocab size, by the looks of it.)

 

I go on an assumption that by relying on your advice one would repeat your rate of progress. I agree I don't come here to socialise, there are other forums for that.

 

11 hours ago, happy_hyaena said:

Going by the comments in this post these terms were introduce in recent times by scholars imposing Western/indo-European linguistic traditions on Chinese?

 

I believe so, given grammars of Chinese did not exist until ~100 years ago.

[imron]

Can we not get in to attacks and responses on people and the speed at which they learn.  Further discussion of that nature (from either side) will be deleted.

 

Take it to PMs if you wish to discuss it further.

[imron]

I meant what I said guys.  2 posts deleted already.  Take it to PM if you want to comment further.

[querido]

All of the below to happy_hyaena:

"The earliest linguistic texts – written in cuneiform on clay tablets – date almost four thousand years before the present."
"The ancient commentators on the classics paid much attention to syntax and the use of particles. But the first Chinese grammar, in the modern sense of the word, was produced by Ma Jianzhong (late 19th century). His grammar was based on the Latin (prescriptive) model.

(see more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_linguistics)

Also, here is a list of grammatical terms used by the ancient Greeks, "mostly" over two thousand years ago, and "the date first attested in a grammatical sense" in English:

http://www.unm.edu/~blanter/Grammar_Term_Origins.pdf .

23 hours ago, happy_hyaena said:

Going by the comments in this post these terms were introduce in recent times by scholars imposing Western/indo-European linguistic traditions on Chinese? Or have they alwyas been there?

They've been there for as long as people have tried to talk about this subject.

To facilitate talking about them, things get categorized (for example, noun vs verb). The necessity of, and the correspondence to reality of, these categories, and where their boundaries should be drawn, is an ancient question and is discussed in a fascinating place where a wide range of fields intersect. But this goes unnecessarily far from our purposes here.

The liberal usage by the aforementioned Chao and Ho (and Yip and Matthews, and "everybody" else) of these concepts is evidence enough, for my practical purposes, of their necessity; if these concepts did not already exist in a language it appears that they would have to be either invented or borrowed. That is necessity, not "imposition". I trust that any features of Chinese that demand the coinage of a new concept would have been noticed by now. But in some cases, it is possible that a concept has not been squeezed into a single word and normalized, and that different writers would "torture" themselves and the reader in different ways to talk about it. If that is the case, and if the writer is good, I suspect that - even if you don't intend to study grammar as part of your Chinese studies - there are precious nuggets in the natural language that's squeezed between all the grammatical terms. In that natural language, they try to explain "the way it's done". This is true for Ho. I never read Chao.

 

[werewitt]

Quote

 

"The earliest linguistic texts – written in cuneiform on clay tablets – date almost four thousand years before the present."

 

And Sumerian, as the first language taught by speakers of and via a totally unrelated language - Akkadian - has become the first language to have its grammar butchered. I happen to have a copy of this nice book, and it mentions re hamṭu / marû:

Quote

These terms have been understood as describing different aspect of the Sumerian verb, but in fact it is also possible that they refer to the Akkadian translations and not primarily to the meanings of the Sumerian verbs. (§231, p. 115)

(Just an example  )

 

Wikipedia seems to concur on IE:

Quote

Modern linguistics began to develop in the 18th century, reaching the "golden age of philology" in the 19th century, with work almost entirely centering around Indo-European studies and leading to a highly elaborate and consistent reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European language. 

 

And re

Quote

They've been there for as long as people have tried to talk about this subject.

One detail is missing - Indo-European people. Even Hebrew / Arabic grammar started only in Middle ages, heavily influenced by IE "linguistics" of that time. If you studied, say, Biblical Hebrew in any depth, you know that the basics - meanings of basic verbs' binyanim - Qatal vs Iqtol in it are still not entirely clear.

 

Anyway these are all dead languages. On the topic of living ones: (from http://www.unm.edu/~blanter/Grammar_Term_Origins.pdf)

Quote

Aspect, 1853 - English term first attested in a grammar of Russian.

- it is nice to know that the very few linguistic terms not originated in Latin's studies of Greek (or Greek itself, although note re late appearance of "aorist" - Romans must have never understood it ), like "aspect", come from studying Russian. This might explain why I have slightly fewer difficulties with Mandarin than native English speakers.

 

OTOH grammatical studies of languages distant from the researcher's native one were always a bit of a losing battle. A while ago, I looked at a couple of Russian grammars written by the English, and got traumatised for life - the amount of declensions, conjugations, and exceptions are about an order of magnitude bigger than what we were taught at school as native speakers (just 3 declensions and 2 conjugations, and a handful of exceptions; the rest is absorbed as part of being a native speaker). I doubt such scientific grammars were for learning purposes anyway.

 

I'll probably have a look at Wiedenhof and Chao for descriptions of some high-level topics that IE grammars get wrong. Obviously detailed study of grammar is rather pointless if one is looking to learn the language, and not about the language.

 

Huge amounts of immersion (=communication), or its poor man's variant - SRS and reading/listening - is the only way to learn a language. 好好学习天天向上！

[陳德聰]

And therein lies the crux. Formal grammars are written by linguists about how a language works, through observation and study, not for the purpose of learning how to communicate. Grammars are supposed to be reference material, not curriculum. They're for when you learn a pattern and you go "okay but why can't I say X", but you're not willing to take "that's just the way it is" for an answer. Again, a linguistic study of Chinese has nothing to do with Latin or Greek, and Chinese linguists are making headway in debunking western linguist's inaccuracies with each passing year. You just can't read their papers yet, but in theory you will be able to eventually.

[lips]

1 hour ago, 陳德聰 said:

okay but why can't I say X

Because nobody says it like that. 

[werewitt]

16 hours ago, 陳德聰 said:

You just can't read their papers yet, but in theory you will be able to eventually.

 

I'd say this is somewhat circular. "You will be able to read the truth about Chinese linguistics only after you master the language, until then live with sub-par English language ones".

I'm glad we at least agree that Chinese grammars in English do not describe the Chinese language truthfully and "western linguists' inaccuracies" do need to be debunked.

[陳德聰]

5 hours ago, werewitt said:

I'm glad we at least agree that Chinese grammars in English do not describe the Chinese language truthfully and "western linguists' inaccuracies" do need to be debunked.

 

I don't think we really agree here, though. You remind me of someone who was taking a linguistics course in China who had this weird idea that western linguists simply can't capture any Chinese linguistics accurately. Perhaps I should have said "any inaccuracies that exist are being actively examined and debunked".

 

You can read some of the papers written in English, but if you don't like the words adjective, adverb, and verb, you are going to hate the words you see in a paper about Chinese.

[eddyf]

10 hours ago, werewitt said:

I'd say this is somewhat circular. "You will be able to read the truth about Chinese linguistics only after you master the language, until then live with sub-par English language ones".

But it's not since as you've already acknowledged, you don't need a detailed academic understanding of Chinese linguistics to learn the language. Native speakers first learn to communicate using the language, and then later they learn the grammar in a classroom, using textbooks written in that same language. It's the same thing you're going to have to do if your goal is really to study the linguistics of Chinese. If your goal is just to become fluent in the language, then don't even bother.

[davoosh]

I found 'Mandarin: A Functional Reference Grammar' by Li to be very informative and useful. It is more of a 'descriptive' grammar based on what prevails in actual usage, with plenty of examples of 'marginal' and 'incorrect' utterances. Of course certain words used to define cross-linguistically very common categories such as 'noun' and 'verb' are used, but I don't think the author of this book sticks to a 'IE-like' description/presentation. It is well written and researched and is primarily an academic reference, so probably not the best resource if you wanted a more pedagogical approach, but I found it a useful reference to have with many examples of usage.

 

(As an aside: I think nowadays the trend in academia is towards descriptive grammars, and they do just that: describe and present the language and then see what meaningful categories and morphological patterns occur. This obviously means they're not geared to learners, but they provide a good overview without getting bogged down.)

[werewitt]

I guess I'm also looking for something like this:

https://www.amazon.com/Making-Sense-Japanese-What-Textbooks/dp/156836492X/

and maybe this:

https://www.amazon.com/Making-Sense-Japanese-Grammar-Problems/dp/0824825837/

but for Chinese.

[lips]

On 5/24/2017 at 4:40 AM, eddyf said:

Native speakers first learn to communicate using the language, and then later they learn the grammar in a classroom, using textbooks written in that same language.

Not quite true for Chinese.