@Brendan / Echo,

as usual a clear, precise explanation of a basic sentence structure from the pair of you. one cann't help but learn well with PopUp.

wo ye xihuan yufa.

is this an ongoing action sentence where i can use 'zai ..'ing'?

'if you keep on being this way (doing this) wo jiu buli ni le'

how would you say first part?

thanks for this great way of learning chinese. Since i have some free time in March 2012, i am considering full time chinese for 3-4 weeks and may i ask if you can suggest a course i could join up?. Prefer Beijing area!

thanks alot. Xie xie ni de bang zhu! Mark

@radioactivemango1,

那 means "in that case" here instead of "that". So the sentence really means, "if you already know (I'm reading a book), why are you still asking?" There's no explicit question word here although you could add one and have 那你怎么还问 or 那你为什么还问 -- both would mean the same thing, but they'd also be a bit less casual.

@Echo, wa! a simple expert way of constructing. i was expecting you using ' zai + a verb'ing' . i'm at a complicated stage of still translating (eng to chin) i'm guessing it takes much study and yrs of sentence structuring before one thinks in chinese words.

zai4 is also 'again' but context will determine meaning right.

zai lai yipianr pijiu - bring again a bottle of beer.

wo zaijiezaili

@richard,

It actually doesn't need years before you can think in Chinese. To your situation, now an important thing is to remember different sentence structures and keep using them. Like the structure "yi1zhi2".

The word "zai4" in "zai4 lai2 yi1 ping2r5 pi2jiu3" is not the same word/character as in "zai4 + verb" structure.

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com

@Richard,

Actually as with many Chinese grammatical structures, one or more of the elements can be omitted.

You could say, wo zhengzai chi fan ne, you could also say, wo zhengzai chi fan , or wo zai chi fan, or wo zai chi fan ne.

Here, zhengzai just emphasizes that the action is currently in progress.

BTW, Just as Echo said, at your current stage you CAN think in Chinese, you just need to apply yourself and practice as many sentence structures as you can so that the vocabulary and sentence patterns will stick.

It's just like my professor used to say, "If you are dilligent, just two years and you can talk freely in Chinese."

@Richard，

Once again Europeans have shown themselves to be the most adept at learning foreign languages. Judging by your posts I thought you were a native English speaker.

I think that any dedicated language learner naturally wants to add as many words as possible in order to sound authentic. My friend is always criticizing my Chinese as 太复杂了, too complicated. She says that speaking that way makes it uncomfortable for the listener, that they'll quickly become impatient and want to end the conversation.

Echo can attest to my overly wordy Chinese posts.

我老是有滔滔不绝地说话的习惯。怎么办？

Just remember that Chinese is a very uncomplicated, extremely complicated language. What I mean is that it has the most complex writing system in the world. You also have to learn more vocabulary in order to sound "native" than with any other language.

That being said, the grammar is relatively uncomplicated. There are no "tenses", only "aspects". Also much of the language is implied. If something doesn't have to be said, then Chinese people won't say it.

Also, I don't know if this would be applicable to your situation or not, but absolutely DO NOT memorize any vocabulary unless you're absolutely CERTAIN that it is useful and high frequency. I've spent probably years of my life memorizing vocab that I think is extremely interesting, then, when I try to use it in conversation I just get blank stares. The reason I'm saying this is that Chinese has so many thousands of years of history, that much of the vernacular that you'll find in dictionaries has fallen out of use.

I'd recommend to supplement your learning, to go on the web and find articles and stories to read. At the beginner level, children's stories can be a great help to memorize vocabulary and get a natural feel for the structure of the language. Also, Popup has a great deal of annotated stories on the site.

Also you can find a ton of children's stories on the following site,

http://www.tonghua5.com/

What you don't understand you can just copy into www.mdbg.net and find the individual meanings of the words.

I'm a tremendous believer in EXTENSIVE READING. Throughout the language learning process you need to contact as much new information as possible. Much of it you won't remember initially, but that's okay because it's necessary to the learning process. PLANTING SEEDS is the number one key to success. Regardless of what language learning method you ascribe to, EXTENSIVE READING is an absolutely necessary component. After the seeds have been planted, they WILL sprout, that you can be certain of.

I look at it this way, think of a child. In order to grow they need tons of food. Some will be metabolized into energy, some will be converted to muscle mass, bone mass, skin, hair, etc. Some will be converted to waste. But as a person grows they need sustenance and lots of it. It's the same as your language.

This is why I ascribe to the 80/20 rule. 80% of language learning is just CONTACTING new material, or re-contacting the same material in a new context. The other 20% is refining what you've already learned.

So keep contacting new material. Some of it you will understand right away, some of it you won't understand at all, but will provide a building block to understand something else, and at some point you WILL understand it and be able to use it for yourself.

Anyway, just my 2 cents.

Hope it can be of some help.

小虎

@Richard,

I highly admire your tenacity to begin learning a highly complicated language like Chinese in your golden years.

佩服你！

I agree, language is the #1 best way to excercise your mind.

My advice is, best to tackel hanzi sooner than later. The reason for this is, you WON'T find any native texts written in Pinyin...period, end of story. Pinyin is ONLY for the purposes of teaching pronunciation of Chinese characters. If you can't read Hanzi, then you'll never really be able to fully unlock the world of Chinese. You'll never be able to read a Chinese text message, e-mail, article, or book. If it's in electronic form, I suppose you can copy and paste it into an electronic dictionary, which is both tedious and time-consuming. And anyway, if you do copy it into an electronic dictionary, then the hanzi is right there, why not take an extra moment or two to try and remember it?

Start learning Characters from the get-go. Trust me.

The best way to learn Chinese Characters is by remembering the components.

For example, 说 shuo1 (to speak), is made up of two components, yan2 言 （words）in simplified form as a radical it appears as, 讠. The second component is 兑 dui4.

In this type of construction, which is a meaning-sound construction, the radical hints at the meaning (the character has something to do with speech or words), and the second component hints at the pronunciation.

This character is a 多音字, duo1 yin1 zi4, or a character with multiple pronunciations. It can be pronounced, shuo1 or shui4. When it's pronounced shui4, then it's a verb meaning "to persuade". Which, don't we persuade others by using words?

Also, remember the verb 有 (you3) can NEVER be negated with 不 (bu4), only with 没 (mei2), so 不有用 (bu4 you3 yong4) should be 没有用 (mei2 you3 yong4).