Resources for Following the Logic of Literary Sentences

[Polyhistor]

I'm at the point now where I know most of the characters and words I encounter and I'm pretty well acquainted with the grammar. All good. But there's another issue, one which rarely seems to be discussed, dissected, and expounded upon, and that is structuring.

 

Reading 连城诀, and with many of the other Chinese books I've looked through, there are so many occasions where there's a paragraph most of the words of which I understand quite well, all at least passingly, and the grammar isn't too perplexing, yet still I'm having a hard time making sense of what meaning it means to convey, what with all the commas and clauses and whatnot. 

 

Does anybody know of resources which in particular focus on overcoming difficulties of this nature?

[mouse]

I'm not sure I agree that the literary-ness of Chinese fiction is rarely discussed. It's an issue many learners come across. And certainly lots of people struggle with Jin Yong, but without an example it's hard to know what exactly you find difficult. You seem to be talking about what sometimes gets called parataxis 意合法 (as opposed to English's hypotaxis 形合法). There's a fair bit of debate about this in linguistics, but basically it's the difference between these two sentences:

 

"The idea of a fish being able to generate electricity strong enough to light small bulbs and even to run an electric motor is almost unbelievable."

“鱼能发电，其强度足以点亮小灯泡，甚至能开动马达，这简直是令人难以置信的。”

(example from here)

 

Is this the sort of thing you mean?

 

In the end, I think the answer to how you get familiar with these types of linguistic phenomena is unfortunately going to be very simple: read more.

[Tomsima]

14 minutes ago, mouse said:

read more.

 

The only answer, really

[realmayo]

Presumably that's because first, you'll get more familiar with words - so you know which words are likely to belong together, or which words are likely to be a verb in some cases and a noun in other cases. And second, you start intuitively picking up and then applying the rules or conventions of Chinese writing.

 

There must be a short-cut to "read more", which I suppose would be a more intensive form of reading where you focus on those grammar rules or conventions. Or you read texts which are intentionally full of those grammar rules. One example of the rules would be, say, the 以 A 为 B construction: not challenging to understand on its own, but you really want to be super comfortable with what it is doing in every sentence that you see it in.

 

In another thread I tried to explain why some of the literary grammar constructs actually help, rather than hinder, reading: https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/58245-“虚词”-the-independent-reader/