Chinese Sentence Structure & Word Order

Hi @YuQinCai, @Constance_Fang @Fiona and the ChinesePod team, my question is this:
Can you help on more complex sentences? When I study for the HSK exams and they have us put the words in correct order, I struggle. If it’s an easy sentence like 今天很热。 That’s no problem. It has a time word and adjective. My problem lies in the more advanced sentences. The multiple nouns, verbs, time words, location and adverbs. With multiple nouns scrambled I don’t know which is the “main noun/subject.” Plus when adding in all the grammar sentence structures like if I need to add 就 somewhere I get thrown off completely. If I read a more complex sentence I can understand it just fine, but somehow I am unable to recreate one of my own. I don’t know if I’m describing this correctly or not. I just feel flustered that my sentences are always in the incorrect order and I can’t seem to change them into the correct order. PLEASE HELP!!!

Hi DeathNevermore,

Can you give me some examples you have in mind? If I have a few of your examples, I can maybe find a pattern of where your “ordering” problems come in. Lets work on them together.

It’s great to know that you can read and comprehend complex sentences but I just want to assure you that making your own sentences will become easier once you start to “play” with ordering. Have you looked at our lessons on “就”? And can you start with a sentence using it? just a quick reminder, Chinese “subject” in a sentence can be a person, a thing, a situation or a noun clause that requires a cluster of words without an explicit subject (like a conditional statement: 如果明天的天氣不好，就去不了海灘) .

Looking forward to your sample sentences.

So, they give the words: 公司，机会，提供了，一些， 学习的。 I put 公司机会学习的一些提供了。 The correct sentence was：公司提供了一些学习的机会。 The next one they gave： 内容，那本杂志，的，十分，丰富。 I put, 那本杂志的丰富十分内容。The correct sentence is：那本杂志的内容十分丰富。I guess I am having trouble with recognizing when a verb is an actual verb and not the noun and putting them in correct order.

I find that these kinds of exercises might have some value to see what words you have mastered, but not as a learning tool. At my level, I can look at those words and immediately know what the sentence is trying to say, and can therefore put them in the right order easily - because I am already thoroughly familiar with all the words.

I’ve never spent time trying to learn how to do exercises like that, and instead focus on building my active vocabulary and developing 语感 - a “feel” for how Chinese should work.

Hi DeathNevermore,

I agree with Elijah that just by looking at the sample sentences done by you, it does seem like you got the meaning of the vocabulary words wrong, and therefore you didn’t get the order right. Did you NOT let yourself look up the vocabulary words when you are doing the ordering exercise? And may I know if you are a German speaker?

When you see 提供了, or xx了， what part of speech do you think this clause is? A noun clause? A verb clause?

What about 學習的， or XX 的？ What part of speech do you think this clause is?

I knew what the words were. I know that for 提供了it can be before an adjective or a verb.

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the first one is correct.

第一印象一般很難 （難 is the verb that explains the state of thing) 改變 (verb noun)。

樓下的（adj）超市 （n) 要+招聘 (when you see 要 and another verb clause, you always put 要 before that verb clause)

時間安排得 (安排 is the verb therefore clustered with 得）很緊張

那位司機給我留下了 （了being the marker of an action being completed and thus makes 留下了)很深的印象。

I think I can begin to see that you are facing one of the most challenging Chinese grammar points which is to assign the part of speech to some Chinese words that are noun-verb or verb-adjective. Many Chinese words can be verb-noun and verb-adj.

Can you tell me what type of Chinese text do you usually read？The reason I ask about your reading habit is that the best place to come across how these words are used is news articles. I haven’t come across a teaching material that gives students practices on this grammar point. Maybe this is the opportunity for us to create lessons to fill this learning gap?

According to the answer book I got #45 wrong. When it comes to reading, I have my textbook NPCR 3, the HSK 4 Standard Course from BLCUP/Hanban, Chinese Breeze series, Mandarin Companion series, Modern Chinese Grammar textbook, etc. Still nothing seems to be helping. I tried to read newspapers before but they’re too difficult and I unfortunately never seem to have the motivation to actually translate it and look up the words I don’t understand.

When I refer to knowing the words, I used the phrase “thoroughly familiar.” Knowing the dictionary definition would likely not have helped me much. To be “thoroughly familiar” with a word means that I can actually use it correctly in a variety of situations without too much difficulty.

For me, doing exercises like this is a good measure of my active vocabulary. If the words are in my passive vocabulary, then exercises like this just don’t work for me.

My hunch is that, in the first paragraph, your 今天很热 example has words that are all comfortably in your active vocabulary, but words like 十分 and 丰富 are still in your passive vocabulary.

That would make sense. Any tips on how you move your passive vocab to your active? Or is it just through frequent usage?

That’s a big question. How much of a Chinese environment are you in? Do you get daily conversational practice?

I read somewhere that it takes at least 20 different exposures to a word in different easily understandable contexts to get a grasp on a word. For me, what made the biggest difference is hearing the ChinesePod dialogues over and over. Within a level, the same words are repeated many times in different contexts.

As I started being able to remember the tones on the less familiar words, actually using them in conversation was the key. It was a slow process. Even in a Chinese environment, I’d say it typically took me a month to get a word in passive vocabulary, then another month to move it into active vocabulary.

But I was 29 years old when I started. My younger classmates (2 in particular) seemed to be able to pick words up almost instantly.

Incidentally, I’m sure some westerners have learned some Chinese from reading the news, but I have yet to meet even one of them. I think our Japanese classmates did OK with it, but the rest of us were just too exasperated to learn anything. Even when we did manage to understand something, we felt like we had just spent an hour with Sir Humphrey: