I am surprised that you all said that this sentence could be accepted
because it is 'grammatically correct'. How about semantics? Do we actually
say it like this in Chinese? (Surely this is not a good English sentence.)
Are we teaching our children to speak nonsense so long as it is
grammatically acceptable? I think everyone knows in languages there are
many exceptions to the rules of grammar so we as teachers should not over
emphasis the use of grammar in our teaching especially to our young
children. Most English children, as far as I know, are already very
confused by their English grammar so we should keep our grammar as simple
as possible. Unfortunately not many English people nowadays know the term
of 'predictive' except linguists. I think we should teach our learners not
only grammatically correct but also semantically sound Chinese sentences.
This is only my personal view, please let me know your comment. Many thanks
for your attention.
Qiao
University of Sussex
--On 07 November 2007 23:18 +0800 Cheryl Huang <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
>
> Grammatically correct. If a student make a sentence such as this. I
> would accept it is a correct sentence, especially for the primary school
> pupils. (And give the pupil a good thumb up for the effort!) And it(the
> sentence) would work when talking about pictures, stories or some comic
> situations anyway. One might like to help them rephrase it to make a
> clearer context. Otherwise, it is nothing wrong to make a sentence that
> might seem a bit silly in a native speaker's ears. To my view, it is
> fine! For more able pupils, one can help making the sentence with more
> details, such as 我是红色头发的女孩. or 我是穿红色衣服的那个女孩, ...
> Let's not forget languages are also about creativity.
>
> Cheryl
>
>
> Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2007 14:24:08 +0000From:
> [log in to unmask]: Re: Your viewsTo:
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
> Dear Colleagues, I think you have already made that a bit complcated. if
> just talked about grammar, there is nothing with context of the sentence.
> 我是红色女孩. is grammatically correct, sub+ predicate + object, but
> maybe has many meanings which can not be changed to 我是个红色的女孩子。
> also, there is nothing with numbers of characters as your explanation.
> hope it is helpful. george> Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2007 11:51:14 +0000> From:
> [log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: Your views> To:
> [log in to unmask]> > Dear Isabella,> > In my
> humble view, '。' would be idiomatically better. > > Generally - from the
> top of my head - if the colour adjective has one only character, you may
> use it right before a noun, eg, 红女孩; 白衬衫. If there are two or more
> characters, you would like to use 色的 as a sort of suffix, eg,
> 深蓝色的衬衫.> > However, there are exceptions - 我爱这蓝色的海洋... or
> the repetitive form: 蓝蓝的天上白云飘。> > If there is a metaphor
> character before the colour, ie, 雪白, 火红 etc, then 的 is commonly
> used: 火红的年代.> > It would be easier if you could provide a context,
> then the choice of words would be far more precise.> > We are talking
> about Modern Standard Chinese, not hangovers from Classical Chinese of
> course. 我是红色女孩。> > 祝好。> > Cc> > -----Original Message----->
> From: Mandarin Chinese Teaching
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Isabella
> Teng> Sent: 2007年11月6日 21:06> To:
> [log in to unmask]> Subject: Your views> > > > I
> would appreciate it very much, if you could give me any comments, in
> terms of accuracy, on the sentence below. > > I also put the pinyin down
> in case you cannot read the characters: Wǒ shì hóng sè nǚ hái.> >
> This is just a single sentence, there is no context with the sentence.> >
> > > > Thank you in anticipation.> > > > Isabella Teng> >
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