It is inevitable for learners to learn the grammar when they learn any kind of language. It is the same for students who learn Chinese in China because only with grammar can we put the words together into sentences to express what we intend to say.
We have taught students how to make the correct pronunciation or how to distinguish the differences between the similar words. It might be enough for a tutor teacher when you have done all of these perfectly. But there are many teachers always complain that they often confused by the questions about the grammar students asked. Teachers at Chinese school in China often bothered by students’ questions because they don’t know how to explain correctly.
However, Rome wasn’t built in a day. It is not an easy job to solve the problems about the grammar. Therefore, we will discuss how to study Chinese by settling the grammar matters.
Firstly, we should know what the grammar is actually. Simply speaking, grammar is the rules and principles of using language. Most Chinese people started to learn grammar in junior middle school. But it doesn’t mean that we spoke nonsense during the time before that. Actually, we have been learning some grammar since we started to learn to speak Chinese. It is just we didn’t realize because our parents didn’t teach us language like what the teacher do.
Language is a very mysterious thing. You can even speak a sentence with grammatical logic. But the language learners may probably fail to say every sentence grammatically correct even they know all about the grammar. But when students who learn Mandarin ask you questions about the grammar, you can help them summarize by exampling.
When learning Mandarin Chinese, students may ask the questions about the grammar you never considered, there is no need to rack your brains to explain with a very logical way. On the contrary, you can just take several examples. It is also needless to explain the sentence structures in details. The only things you should do is to give a simple example can reflect the grammar.
It often happens that when the students ask questions teacher can’t explain, they would say there is no why and it is just the way we use it. Under this circumstance, students learn Mandarin in China may think there is no grammar in Chinese language, which is absolutely wrong. Therefore, you can’t do like that when theChinese language learners ask such questions because it will have a bad effect on students’ language learning.
During the process of teaching Chinese, there are two conditions you need to explain the grammar, one of which the condition we mentioned above. Another troublesome condition is that the students speak the sentences with great mistake in grammar when they learn Mandarin. That sentence may be so terribly wrong that you can’t understand what they are trying to say. But there are also some sentences that have no bad effect on the normal communication such as “昨天我见面我的老朋友”. We can definitely understand the meaning of the incorrect sentence even it is grammatically incorrect.
If you are teaching the Chinese language learners who study in China, you must help them to correct the mistake because you are a teacher. It is relative to your professional ethics. If you don’t correct the mistakes, you are telling students that they speak that correctly, thus students will make the same mistakes continuously.
However, for the tutoring teachers, there is no need to obey it so strictly. For some serious grammatical errors, there is no doubt that you should correct to help them study Chinese. However, if the mistakes do not influence the normal communication, you can just let them say and record the errors then correct all at last.
It is very important for teachers to encourage Chinese language learners to speak more, especially for those shy students. In order to encourage them study initiatively when they learn Chinese language in China, you should give them more opportunity to practice and it is better not always correct them, thus improving the degree of fluency.
The two conditions mentioned above are the most frequently met when we teach students. One is to explain correctly with examples when students ask questions related to grammar, the other is to correct the mistakes when they say grammatically wrong sentences.