Do any Chinese-specific learning tips and tricks really exist?

[werewitt]

18 minutes ago, zander1 said:

To be fair I received very little formal education in terms of grammar for English (in England). 

I can see why my requests fall on deaf ears then  We studied it quite a lot e.g. 4th year program here (I couldn't find an English example, soz. Google Translate to the rescue.)

[zander1]

Just now, werewitt said:

We studied it quite a lo

 

Yeah I think England is quite different to most Western education systems in this regard. I know in Germany and France at least grammar is studied quite extensively.

[zander1]

On that note it is also not at all uncommon for people with English as a second language to have a better understanding of English grammar than some native speakers, particuarly in written, formal grammar.

[imron]

14 hours ago, zander1 said:

Yeah I think England is quite different to most Western education systems in this regard

I can confirm that in Australia we didn't learn much about English grammar in school either.

[Zeppa]

Quote

can confirm that in Australia we didn't learn much about English grammar in school either.

It's the same in Germany too. I'm often surprised at how educated German speakers are incapable of explaining a grammatical problem and we non-natives have to explain it. But I realize it's normal. A native speaker learns a language by feeling and can't necessarily theorize on it. I don't know about the rest of western Europe of course!

[Balthazar]

Pretty much the same here in Norway. We do learn some grammar, obviously, but pretty much only the bare basics. This only dawned on me recently, after my wife started learning Norwegian and I realized I was unable to answer most of her grammar related questions in a meaningful way (i.e. beyond "that's just how it is").

[陳德聰]

I think it has been mentioned: language-specific learning tips need to factor in what language you are starting from, you are saying English and/or Russian.

 

I don't know anything about Russian but I spend a good deal of my time teaching English speakers how to learn Chinese. Unfortunately, what my study of language acquisition didn't prepare me for is the lack of generalised understanding of how language works and how learning works, which is why I think people spend so much time going on about generalised learning strategies that are common to all language (e.g. Stop trying to translate word-by-word in the same damn order of your native language).

 

Once all that stuff is out of the way, you end up with things like the topic-comment structure that is particularly confusing for speakers of English, but is ubiquitous and often preferred in Chinese. You can talk about things like contextual vs analytical languages and how to understand which words Chinese people will skip and why. You can talk about noun classes that don't really exist for English speakers. You can talk about translation issues like how to handle English's excessive relative clauses, how to handle the extensive use of metonymy and metaphor of Chinese that sometimes baffles English speakers, etc.

 

But if you are not aware of the issues other language learners have with different backgrounds, you will just think these are generalised issues... Until you meet a Japanese person who talks almost exclusively in Topic Comment sentences or a Korean person who never seems to want to explicitly name a subject.

[yueni]

I honestly don't think anybody actually understands how grammar in their native tongue works, besides the basics, unless they take linguistics classes. Although I learned basic grammar stuff in primary school, and never had issues identifying verbs and nouns and adjectives and so on, I didn't really learn grammar until I took German.

 

I think you also have to factor in that I was learning German as a teenager, versus learning English & Chinese as a child. So I never properly learned English or Chinese grammar the way a non-native speaker would (even though Chinese is not my native language). This means that while my English language is fluent, the oddities in my Chinese language acquisition meant that I had internalized certain language rules for Chinese, while sounding oddly like an English speaker trying to write Chinese for other rules. It was really, really weird for me in terms of Chinese.

 

When I learned German, I was an older learner, and after the first couple years of bare basic sentence structures (No, no, it is ich bin gegangen, not ich habe gegangen etc), my German teacher (who had a linguistics background) taught us verb phrases and noun phrases, and how to parse sentences, and that was a huge revelation for me in terms of learning grammar. I actually used it in my later study of Chinese. It did make for exceedingly time consuming reading and writing though.

 

Most people I know with strong grammar (and this is just anecdotal) speak more than one language. I hypothesize that this is because learning the grammar of your native tongue is not something people do to learn it, but rather, they learn it after the fact, so it's more like finding rules that apply to what you already know, whereas older people learning a foreign language tend to need the grammar rules a little bit like a crutch to break down the language structure so they can piece the structure back together again in a comprehensible manner.