I agree that Chinese grammar is comparatively simple. Once you get a hang of it, it becomes pretty easy.

One reason why people find Chinese grammar to be easy might also be because other aspects of Chinese language (tones, characters) are extremely difficult. So it might be a relative thing.

Hi Neil,

In fact, I think grammar does not really exist. Well, it does, because we artificially created it.

To illustrate my point, try to ask a Chinese native speaker some grammatical questions. I bet he cannot answer most of them.

Once you liberate yourself from grammar, I am sure your learning will expose.

 As a native speaker, we almost never care about the syntax during the whole primary and middle school. But grammar exists, mostly and mainly in the morphology. We analyze the structure of  4-character words or idioms’ (成语).

I have been studying Chinese for three months now and I am in a similar phase. Irefuse to learn Chinese ‘idiomatically’ as I see many people around me doing but at the same time I find very few grammatical anchors to structure a sentence. The result is that, for how much I study I never feel confident to formulate even the easiest sentences.
Just yesterday I came to a realisation similar to yours, that the difficult part of translating a thought into Chinese is ‘shaving off’ all the extra information that Western languages put in a sentence even when it doesn’t define the meaning of the sentence in any useful way and reducing it to the Chinese ‘essential’ version.

Traditional institutional approaches to language instruction fail most people by teaching vocabulary and grammar in an unnatural way that ignores our innate tendencies to pick up “language chunks” in context and intuit grammar and structure from broad exposure to the language.

Our minds figure out to drop the 和 quickly enough once we’ve been exposed to people saying the sorts of things we want to say. Traditional language education is a disaster because it isn’t taught in a way that lets us emulate and then generalize. Maybe COE is helpful to some people, but fixing language instruction requires imho much more: presenting students with more and more interesting Chinese materials and demanding more creativity from learners than is typical especially in Chinese language classrooms.

Nice post. :)

As a native speaker, I have to say that any efforts to add the so-called “grammar” to Chinese are meaningless. It is true that many researchers and linguists invented a grammar system for Chinese, but anyone who wants to master the real Chinese especially used in literature and serious articles should know that a Chinese sentence or an article is integral. Chinese sentences, however the phrases or words are arranged, are meant to express a whole meaning. What this means is that even if a sentence has no subject, or no verb, as long as it expresses a complete meaning, it is acceptable and in some cases preferred. In a word, Chinese is to express meaning by put characters together. So you should focus on how the whole meaning is established, not the grammar or some specific characters.

Just a few points I want to make about my own experience
learning Mandarin the past 5 years.

I’d like to know your opinion too!!

1. TONES

Tones are easy enough to learn in isolation, but string various combinations
together and one is sure to hit certain problems.  Much like a camel
travelling over very bumpy terrain. One need to angle oneself quite skilfully
and hold on tight!

 I thus think that one needs to carefully identify ci/ 词 units
(whether these are comprised 2 or 3 characters) and combine the tones into
their appropriate “rhythm” units. If his is not done, ones reading may
sound overly staccato in quality. Moreover, there would be a sense that all the
syllables/characters are overly broken down into blocks… or so it would seem to
the Chinese ear.

I certainly still make tone mistakes, even though I pay special attention to
marking all the characters tones in a new passage and practicing them
religiously.

Even with more advanced learners, despite intellectual/conceptual awareness of
what tones each character is, mistakes are still unconsciously made during the
combination phase. In my experience, if a string of second tones characters is centred
by the third tone, I’m bound to slip up on this third!

 It thus doesn’t help that a Chinese teacher says, “no, that’s a
third!”, it is better that they just repeat the word or phrase until it
flows to the learners ear and greater sensitivity is developed. It must become
intrinsic.

Sometimes teachers leave tone correction until too late, at which stage this
very unhelpful habit becomes ingrained. Most foreigners are not simply going to
pick up the tones as they go along.

Foreigners have a conceptual break, for better or for worse, between tone and
phonetic pronunciation. We somehow see them as separate aspects (at least
initially). The result is confusion as to just what the teacher is correcting.
“Is it the zhi and chi phonetic component that is being corrected or is it
my tone?”

Example would be the erroneous conception that “hao” is brother to
all four tones, while they are in fact four independent and unrelated words.
Maybe it would helpful if teachers were aware of this. (Although, even Chinese
people recognise phonetic similarities between certain words, as one can see in
repeated phonetic indicators, eg. 抱，包，跑，炮)。

Mmm … just a thought.

Question to you guys: what would happen, do you think, of spaces were
introduced between”words” in Chinese texts? would it help? I’m not
sure myself…

2.Verb + 了，着，过,
完
are reasonably difficult to use correctly. What do you think about Verb + 起来，出来，得到，不到， 下去, 过来， 过去？

I sense that there is a movement in the language that is attached to the
arising and sinking of emotion (negative emotions sink (下来) and
positive emotions arise upwards (起来))。

起来,
for one, I see frequently in texts, for example 走起来
which I have often thought of “begin walking”, a kind of continuum
until now/ present moment. As a result I erroneously wanted to write in my 作业： “我七点从图书馆走起来”
(I started walking at 7pm)。I am still thinking in tenses! 我七点开始走would
have been fine.

 In truth, 起来 is not a tense construction, so
my initial sentence was wrong. What was wrong with my sentence is that there is
an over emphasis on the start of the action, as if it was somehow central to
the sentence’s meaning. This is how I understand the matter anyhow!

3. Time is vertical. Actions and states manifest or change.  Situations
transform. But time, in the tense sense, is not conceptually part of this
picture.

Hope my comments make sense!