现今，不少的人埋怨中国学生的语文水平日益恶化。一位中国朋友举了以下的例子：
这位朋友的观点是：一、如今有的人在没有必要用连词的情况下还是会去滥用。二、汉语中的连词丰富多彩，但是如今有的人选择只用一个“口头禅”连词（往往是“然后”）。
作为一个在中国当地学习汉语口语的外国学生，我得承认从日常生活中我只能学会最基本的连词，像“然后”、“因为”、“所以” ，因为一般的现代中国人在生活中用连词不甚丰富，而且会出现误导的现象（像“然后”）。因此我以为想掌握汉语连词的留学生最好从文学中学连词的用法而不是从生活中。…
People keep telling me they want to hear more about what it’s like to be a grad student in China. I promise I’ll say more in the future, but for now here’s my class schedule for this semester. At this point I haven’t even been to the first class yet for most of these classes, though, so I can’t comment on the content yet.
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10:00- |
Modern Chinese |
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Studies in Pragmatics |
从小我的语法老师一直强调：写英语的时候必须要分清楚哪里应用句号，哪里应用逗号。如果分不清楚就是错误！开始学汉语时我发现在汉语的语法规则当中，句号和逗号的使用似乎不是那么严重的问题。或许这是因为中文标点符号的历史比较短，所以规则不是那么死板。我认识的一位美籍翻译甚至说过：
I think that the way Chinese is presently written, with clauses related by topic and linked by commas, is a better reflection of the way people think than is the structure of written English.（我认为当代汉语的写作用逗号来连接相关的分句，因而要比英语书面语的结构更好地反映人的思路。）
虽然学汉语的外国人肯定需要不少的时间掌握汉语写作的基本原则，我仍然觉得句号和逗号的问题不大。学习英语的中国学生反而要学很多年的英语才能掌握英语语法规则中的句号和逗号的区别。中国学生往往会把该分成几个句子的英语用逗号连接而写出一句很长却不符合英语语法的句子。…
I’ve been helping a student prepare for the IELTS (雅思 in Chinese), and she recently brought an interesting point to my attention. In her book of practice tests (a quality book published by Oxford University Press), different fonts were used for different reading selections. For example, a selection about biology was written in Times New Roman, whereas an article about education was written in Arial, and a passage about blindness and visualization was written in Verdana. She wanted to …
I’m currently doing some editing work for a Taiwanese book on English. It’s one of those books that takes the most common English words, organizes them alphabetically, then provides a Chinese translation, English sample sentence, and Chinese translation of said sample sentence for each word. Now, since each word only gets one sample sentence, it’s important that the usage in each sentence (1) corresponds to the most common meaning of that word, and (2) provides clear usage of the word.…
I recently learned that a grad student at my university worked hard over the CNY vacation and earned 8000 rmb. That’s about US$1000. That might not seem like a lot if you don’t live in China, but that is quite an impressive sum for a college student to earn in two months. To put it in perspective, my university teaching job in Hangzhou got me only 3000 rmb per month to start. Many Chinese laborers earn less than 1000 …
An older post by ChinoChano brought my attention to an amusing page on Chinese-Tools.com called New Chinese Characters. The characters are created by foreigners using existing character components (some knowledge of Chinese required). Some of them are pretty funny. Anyway, the page inspired me to create a few new characters of my own:
Key:
Two weeks ago was “Super Bowl Monday.” At 6am John B and I caught a taxi to Windows Scoreboard, the place the Carl said would be “the place” to catch the big game. Well, “the place” insofar as it’s a pretty decent sports bar, beer is cheap (in the Windows tradition), and you can even get a decent American breakfast for a reasonable price. Plus they were showing the Super Bowl through satellite TV, so we didn’t have to …
John has lived in China for
11.5
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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