Chinese Grammar Isn’t As Simple As You Think!

I’ve often heard learners and teachers alike say Mandarin grammar is ‘simple.’

Unlike European languages, they point out that there are no genders, verb conjugations or plurals to worry about.

That’s true enough. But Chinese grammar can also be deceptively tricky!

The way native speakers construct sentences often follows a different logic and word order from what we’re used to.

So one of the biggest problems learners face is reproducing authentic Chinese grammar structures that aren’t based on English grammar or ‘Chinglish.’

Chinese or Chinglish?

For years I was blind to the fact that much of my spoken Mandarin was actually Chinglish rather than authentic Mandarin.

When I spoke Chinese everyone could understand me perfectly. Or so I thought…

That all changed one day a couple of years ago following an interaction with my language exchange partner, Pearl.

At the start our our call one evening I tried explaining to Peal that I wanted to record our conversation so I could listen back to it afterwards.

I took the English sentence “I want to record our conversation” and translated it word for word into Chinese, before blurting out:

“我想录我们的对话”
wǒ xiǎng lù wǒ mén de duì huà

By this point, my tones were pretty good so I was pretty sure I hadn’t made any mistakes there. But I could tell from Pearl’s expression she had no idea what I was talking about.

I repeated it slowly and clearly. No luck.

Finally, I resorted to English. Pearl’s face immediately lit up.

“Oh! You want to say：我想把我们的对话录下来 wǒ xiǎng bǎ wǒ mén de duì huà lù xià lái ！”

This experience sent me down a rabbit hole trying to improve my Chinese sentence structure.

And as it turned out, this blind spot had been causing more communication issues than I was aware of.

In fact, native speakers often struggle to decode our Chinglish sentences. Due to Chinese politeness, they might not tell us when they haven’t completely understood what we’ve said, or just prefer to let it slide and let the conversation flow.

Nailing Sentence Structure

But I wanted to learn Chinese not Chinglish!

So I looked into what the best Chinese learners did to nail sentence structure and came across a technique called sentence mining.

Sentence mining involves collecting and drilling hundreds of example sentence structures and training yourself to reproduce them flexibly when speaking Chinese.

The reason it works so well for Mandarin in particular, is precisely because Chinese doesn’t have verb conjugations.

Instead of memorising conjugation tables, you can collect hundreds of example sentences containing authentic and common grammar structures.

Once you master how to say a sentence in the first person, you can easily and flexibly reproduce it in the he/she/it form without having to worry about verb changing!

Take the sentence above that Pearl taught me. After learning how to say I wanted to record the conversation, I could easily tweak the sentence to ask Peal:

“Do you want to record our conversation?”

“你想把我们的对话录下来吗？ ”

After a few weeks of sentence mining, I noticed a significant improvement in my sentence structure.

My tutor corrected me less than before in class and I felt more confident that I was expressing myself in authentic Mandarin.

Within three months the difference was like night and day and I’ve never looked back!

Mischa Wilmers