中文?

Snitchcat

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Hi mate! I'm also Chinese! 学习英文写作中。。。

Hi, welcome to the Chinese family at AW!

我也是华人,但很久没有说普通话啦!你好!

What do you like writing? what are you working on? Are you writing in multiple languages, or exclusively in one?
 
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Snitchcat

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I'm curious: Do we have anyone still in China any more (besides me), or any member who still visits this thread? (^_^)
 

Snitchcat

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Aww.... 没有其他人在中国? 还是我太心急啊?Hehehe.
 

Snitchcat

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圣诞很快到了!请问,你们有什么节目?
 

Snitchcat

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新年到了!今天是年二十九,过了明天就是狗年!

你们有什么节目,想在今年达到什么目标?
 

Snitchcat

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恭喜發財!
祝各位新年快樂、行大運、身體健康、萬事如意、心想事成!
恭喜!恭喜!
 

Snitchcat

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今天是初五,是香港新年后上班的第一天。 是时候祝福同事们...有红包吗?Heheheh.


祝大家狗年身体健康,事事顺利,心想事成,笑口常开!
 

Snitchcat

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Just noticed this thread: through a strange plot twist at my day job, I'm spending this year as a full-time Mandarin student.

新年快乐!


Very cool! How did you the day job manage to let you spend this year being a full-time student?

Happy Lunar New Year!
 

Snitchcat

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The first 7th day of the New Year is everyone's birthday.

Happy Birthday, Everyone!

初匕是人人的生日!

各位,生日快乐!
 

WiseCrick

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Hi, I'm from China, and may help you with your Chinese, if you help me with my English:tongue
 

Breadandbutter

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I am new to this forum. I just joined yesterday. Today, I got approved and discovered this thread. I notice that many people here don't seem to be native speakers of Mandarin. Native Mandarin speakers tend to have very flexible grammatical structures and word structures. Heritage speakers may be as fluent as a native speaker or as bad as a non-native/second-language speaker, depending on how much exposure to the language they get throughout their life. Non-native/second-language speakers have, um, inflexible grammatical structures. It's not really about the wrongness of the grammar, but how frequently they use a specific grammatical pattern. 你如果 vs 如果你......的话,那. 他在...... vs 在......他. Imagine an English speaker writes like this all the time: "If I had . . . , then . . . " And both the if and then must be included in every hypothetical sentence. The lack of variety will easily be noticed. Non-native/second-language speakers tend to have strict word boundaries, especially if the native language makes clear distinctions of specific words (demonstrate is a verb; demonstration is a noun). The strict word boundaries of the native language definitely influence one's perceptions of the Chinese language. Two-character words get interpreted as a single word in that form with a specific translation based on context. As a result, many non-native/second-language speakers have trouble with splitting up two-character words. They see the two characters as one word, whereas a native Mandarin speaker may see the characters as two distinct words.
 

Snitchcat

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Welcome to AW and the Chinese thread.

A lot of us here are learners of Mandarin, but some of us are fluent/native Cantonese speakers.

Thank you for the detailed information re grammar! Love learning something new about Chinese. ^_^
 

Breadandbutter

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Welcome to AW and the Chinese thread.

A lot of us here are learners of Mandarin, but some of us are fluent/native Cantonese speakers.

Thank you for the detailed information re grammar! Love learning something new about Chinese. ^_^

These references may be helpful for the advanced Mandarin Chinese learner.

  • 新华字典 - New Chinese Character Dictionary (monolingual)
  • 英汉汉英成语袖珍词典 - Pocket Bilingual Idiom Dictionary (bilingual, English idiom with Chinese translation and Chinese idiom with English translation)
  • 现代汉语词典 - Modern Chinese Word Dictionary (monolingual)
  • 新袖珍英语词典 - A New Pocket English Dictionary (English word with English definition and Chinese translation and sample sentence)
  • 最新牛津现代高级英汉双解词典 - The Most Recent Oxford Modern Advanced English-Chinese Bilingual-Explanation Word Dictionary (English word with English and Chinese explanation)
  • 汉典 - http://www.zdic.net/ (This seems to be aimed at a literate Chinese user base.)
  • 中国华文教育网 - http://www.hwjyw.com/textbooks/downloads/zhongwen/ (This seems to be aimed at overseas Chinese children who are raised by Mandarin-Chinese-speaking parents. The 12 books seem to correlate with the 12 books in primary school curriculum in Mainland China. Of course, the earlier books are more bilingual, because overseas Chinese tend to be bilingual. And the readings tend to focus on what overseas Chinese kids can relate to, like everyday life stuff. I put this under Advanced, because people who are exposed to the Chinese language in early childhood learn language differently than people who learn after puberty. People who learn after puberty must learn grammar of the foreign language, and the grammar is never really embedded in the brain. They may be well suited for an advanced, non-native speaker who has most of the basic grammar nailed down and wants some reading exercises.)

For beginners and intermediates:

 
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Snitchcat

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Wow, I think I have most of those links personally. However, an excellent list! Thank you!

Definite bookmarks all the way, lol.
 

Breadandbutter

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This Wikipedia article on Topic-Prominent Language mentions the topic-prominent nature of Chinese.

They tend to downplay the role of the passive voice, if a passive construction exists at all, since the main idea of passivization is to turn an object into a subject in languages where the subject is understood to be the topic by default.

That's definitely true for Chinese. 被 is often described in English-medium Chinese grammar books as the Chinese passive marker, equivalent to "by". However, this does not mean that a translation from English into Chinese has to use this all the time.

The pencil is dropped by Elizabeth. is passive voice.
The pencil is dropped. is still passive voice.
铅笔被我丢了。[The] pencil is lost by me. Note that the English language forces the speaker to include an article. Also, note that 丢 here is translated as passive voice, because the English way of topicalization is through passivation. Pencil by me lost. would be ungrammatical in English.
And finally, note that 被 here is translated as the preposition, "by".
铅笔丢了。[The] pencil is lost.

They usually do not have expletives or "dummy subjects" (pleonastic pronouns) like English it in It's raining.

Unconsciously, most, if not all, bilinguals may experience something called linguistic interference. The linguistic interference may be L1>L2 or L2>L1. I experience both. Too often, I have to substitute English words in an otherwise Chinese conversation. But there was one time when my English side of my brain was activated and thought what I said sounded weird. Outside is snowing. 外面下雪了。At first glance, it seemed to make sense to me. But after taking it to monolinguals, I began to realize that it's really the dummy It. A proper translation for 外面下雪了 would be "Outside, it's snowing." But the word order might be somewhat marked, so the unmarked word order would be "It's snowing outside."

They often have sentences with so-called "double subjects", actually a topic plus a subject.

Refer to the article for examples.

They do not have articles, which are another way of indicating old vs. new information.

I can definitely attest to this. There was a time when I played around in LingoDeer, learning Korean. As a Mandarin speaker, I was awestruck at the similarities between Korean and Mandarin. I noticed that Korean differed from Mandarin in both word order (SOV vs SVO) and subject/object markers. But aside from those two things, there were quite a few similarities - lack of articles, possessives, adjectives, lots of Sino-Korean words, family terms (Korean seems to go a bit further and takes into account of the speaker's gender, like a female would call her brother differently than a male would call his brother). Sometimes, it's a matter of me thinking in Chinese, inverting the word order, and doing activities in Korean. I was exposed to Mandarin tones since birth and the English language since I was 4 years old. So, I was never aware of the difficulties of learning a non-tonal language. However, after learning Korean, a non-tonal language, I could empathize with other tonal-language speakers. A person highly sensitive to Chinese or Vietnamese contour tones may experience confusion or frustration when the tone is changed for some reason. Indeed, my conjecture was confirmed by this claim on Wikipedia: "Vietnamese is a tonal language and speakers may try to use the Vietnamese tonal system or use a mid tone with English words, but they pronounce with a high tone when the closed syllable is followed by /p, t, k/. They may also associate tones onto the intonational pattern of a sentence and become confused with such inflectional changes." Yep, that sounds like me learning Korean.
 
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Snitchcat

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Korean's SOV order, AFAIK, is similar to the Japanese, which is also similar to German word order (the last depends on various words, however, as well as gender/neutral, and case, etc.).

By contrast, Chinese is much simpler in grammatical concept.
 

Errant_Fragments

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Checking in as what appears to be one of the few people living in China on the board. Anyone else around?

大家好! 我是英国人,现在住了在北京三年了。中文水平不太好只有HSK三级因在大学为从来没学习汉语所以每个中午或者周末得学了,有小小的时间啊。在这儿里有别的人吗?住在哪里?
 

Snitchcat

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Not bad for just weekend learning!

Hi Errant! Welcome to the thread!

Life this side of the world is immensely busy, so this thread isn't as active as it once was; not sure where everyone is any more.

How are you finding life in Beijing after 3 years?

我在香港住了很多年; 也不会说普通话, 只会广东话, 所以我的书面中文有点象口语。
 

Errant_Fragments

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Beijing is equal parts great fun and mildly infuriating, but no more or less than anywhere else in the world. Luckily I have acquired a full time local guide which has made life a little more comfortable the past year and we have a little house in the mountains we rent every now and then as our little corner of peace and quiet away from the city.

How about you - what brought you to Hong Kong and what keeps you?
 

Snitchcat

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New beginnings, really. No regrets.

Nice, mountain getaway! Teaching in Beijing or something entirely different?
 

Errant_Fragments

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I work in supporting international university-business research collaboration - although also safe to say that I would rather be doing literally anything other than teaching... and you?