Hi, all
I haven't found that word order is a particular problem for learners in our school but that may be because they've all done at least one other language, sometimes German so they know that they have to think about word order. In fact, they seem to find Chinese sentence order much more logical than English.
With the 吗 question I just tell them that it's much easier than English, they don't have to reverse any word order or add another word like 'do', (they're sometimes impressed to find that they've been doing such a complicated thing in English all their lives.) Say a sentence and stick 吗 on the end, is the rule we learn. And then I have them saying English sentences and sticking 吗 on the end, Fred is a student. Fred is a student ma?
The other sentence order things I teach are the same as others have mentioned:
Time-place-verb
'Who/what/where/how' Question word goes in the same place in the sentence as the answer.
Theresa M.
The Ashcombe
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2011 23:55:47 +0800
From:
[log in to unmask]Subject: Re: English and Chinese syntax
To:
[log in to unmask]Hi 桑甜,
I had similar concerns on how to explain the word order for my beginners as there is insufficient accumulation at syntactic level for them to reflect on. However, the Chinese syntax is totally logical and I think it shares some similarities with the sign language. Something working really well with my learners was miming: I gave the class an instruction and they had to mime it, e.g. "can I sit down?". They pointed at themselves first out of instinct to emphasise "I" and then the chair. So this was my starting point to introduce simple interrogative sentences. With the miming activity, my learners grasped the basic logic behind Chinese language and the idea of saying "我可以...吗" instead of "可以我..吗?" sank in quickly.
As my own experience is limited to beginners, I'd like to hear other teachers' thoughts on this.
Regards,
Qingwei
Mandarin Chinese GTP
Grey Court School
Richmond
At 2011-10-20 14:25:48,"桑甜" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Good morning everyone,
>
>I would like some advice about the syntax in Chinese. I find difficult to explain why the words are in such order in a sentence in Chinese (different from the English syntax). Could you recommend a website, or a book?
>
>Thank you.
>
>Best wishes,
>
>桑甜