How important is grammar to native speakers?
There are, the way I see it, two ways for me to answer this question. From a conscious standpoint and an unconscious one.Unconsciously, everyone cares about grammar. A primary human drive is to be understood — both metaphorically ("She just gets me!") and literally. I imagine that a person who spoke unintelligibly would have a terrible time, because they would feel (and be) misunderstood by everyone they encountered.Some people's unconsciousnesses may be more persnickety about certain things (e.g. someone who reads a lot may have better grammar than someone who never reads for pleasure), but it is important for everyone.Consciously, I'd say that the number of people who care a lot about grammar is significantly fewer than "everyone." Not many people really think about grammar in their native language, and as a result they often discard rules and standards that seem unimportant or unfounded. (In English, little things like apostrophes and capitalization and homophone-confusion, to name just a few.)Many people consciously care about grammar because they have some awareness of the data showing that people with good grammar are seen in a better light than people who confuse it's and its (or whatever). (It's not an article showing particular scientific rigor, but check out this Forbes piece: Report: How Grammar Influences Your Income)Personally, I care about grammar because I love English. I think it's a fabulous language, and I think using it as correctly as I can makes it even more beautiful. Also, to some extent, I feel that I owe it to anyone reading what I've written to provide a decent example. It is my goal to be understood as well as possible. (And dang it — it's fun! I thrive on the feeling of having crafted an elegant sentence!)
What are some common Chinese grammar mistakes that non-native speakers make?
People whose mother tongue expresses the concept of time based on verb conjugation (such as English with its past and perfect tenses, or Russian with its aspects) tend to use the particle 了 a lot heavier than the Chinese.了 (the one that’s “le”, not “liǎo”) has two modes of use: as a perfective aspect marker and as a change of state marker. The aspect marker can be interpreted as Past Simple in English to denote an action in the past that occurred once or habitually. The change of state marker can be interpreted in English as Present Perfect. It is used to express the idea of “already”, such as “I’ve already eaten”.Thing is, the Chinese use this word far more sparingly than foreign learners. When the people who grew up with verb conjugation start learning Chinese, they begin adding 了 religiously to every single verb that expresses an action which could be conveyed in English using past or perfect tenses.There’s also 过 which roughly translates into “used to”, but screwing up 过 is quite rare. 了 takes the crown in this regard.This whole thing could have been avoided, but a lot of Chinese people erroneously believe that their language has no grammar. So your Mandarin tutor says then “ah, Chinese is so easy, it has no grammar”, and you think “well that’s odd, but who am I to argue”, so you start taking the grammar of your mother tongue and injecting it into your Chinese since “there’s no native grammar, so they should understand me”.So listen to native speakers talk, imitate them. Then you can hopefully eschew this issue with 了 entirely.
Do the native speakers speak english without grammar error?
Native speakers do make mistakes, but they tend to be different ones from learners' mistakes. We'll say things like "me and her are going shopping" or "I should have knew" (OK *I* don't say that!). Most people will understand most of what you say. Some people seem to have little imagination and can't figure out what you mean even when you're really close to perfect. People who know your first language will probably understand you best, because they can see what you were thinking to make you say what you said wrong (if you know what I mean). For example, I'm pretty sure when you wrote "I always embarrass when I speak English", you meant you always "get" embarrassED. The way you wrote it means you embarrass other people. But it's perfectly clear. Just keep practicing and stay confident!
Chinese speakers...?
Here is the Mandarin pronunciation: Who is your English teacher? - Shei shi ni de Ying Wen lao shi? She is not my classmate. - Ta bu shi wo de tong xue. What is your last name? - Nin gui xing? Her student's name is Peter. - Ta de xue sheng jiao Peter.
Can native Chinese speakers understand a non-native who does not use correct Chinese sentence structure?
I have more than 10 years real life experience with this question!The key-point here is, how many mistakes does the non-native speaker make?If only a few mistakes and grammar is more or less correct (short sentences, easy structure), than surely every Chinese can understand without any problem.Even if occasionally the tones are completely wrong from my side, but the context is clear, every Chinese can understand.But in the fictional case that all the tones are completely off, general sentence structure is from another world and pronounciation is not standard and from the basics already bad (e.x. zh-, ch-, sh-; -in, -ing, etc), I suppose it would be quite hard to understand. I know for me it would, listen to this kind of Chinese speaking foreigner.I have to admit: people who still struggle with the basics of Chinese language usually are not yet able to talk about complicated topics, so it would be relative easy to understand for Chinese people. Still with a lot of guessing though…But like my old professor always said to us students:“Chinese people are so nice, even if all of your spoken sentences each had a dozen mistakes, the friendly Chinese people still will tell you how good your Chinese language is”!
Is there any advice for a native Chinese speaker who wanna learn French by herself?
Actually, it might not be a good idea for you to learn French entirely on your own since the French language is so delicate and complex that you could easily get lost and scrambled without getting anywhere.You should sign up for a language learning program (preferably one taught in “traditional " Chinese style which really helps lay the foundation if you haven't learned French before ) and proceed with the help of a professional teacher. In this way can you actually make progress without too much delay.When it comes to choosing a language learning institution, you should make your choices based on your own learning characteristics.If you need to be taught face to face and don't prefer to communicate with teachers and fellow learning mates indirectly via electronic devices like computers and cellphones, physical schools aren't a bad choice. However, they tend to pretty costly and time-consuming.Online schools is also a good idea if you're open to online teaching, which has its own advantages, including lower fee and more convenience.Teaching styles and levels are also the determining factors whether you can make steady and significant progress.Make sure that you do everything in your power to seek any information you can find about their teaching methods and decide if they work satisfactorily for you by attending trial lessons.Check the teaching staff’s résumés to find out just how experienced they are. If you don't like what you see, PASS!With solid foundation and suitable teachers teaching in a effective and promoting style, you're gonna crush it. Good luck! Like everything else, this is gonna be a long and shortcut-free yet fruitful journey if you manage to not give up.
Is english hard for chinese speakers to learn?
Extremely. English contains bucket loads of "fluff" words that a Chinese person never sees in their own language. in daily life a Chinese person uses about 3,00-4,000 words where we use basically triple that. You can almost think of Chinese as an "Indian" language. What I'm getting at is that if you've heard "Chinglish" you would understand how Chinese works. They don't have tenses, or verb conjugations. So to them that's just one more constant hanging problem. They also have fewer sounds than we do, making for pronunciation problems. Here's an example of simple Chinese grammar. I want to go to the store, He wants to go to the store, She wants to go to the store. Check it out 我 想去 超市 I broke it up to subject verb object. here's he wants to go 他 想去 超市 notice anything different? just changed from 我 to 他. Long story short, languages with fixed characters are very hard to conjugate, so you most of the time just add another character into the sentence to change the tense, and never conjugate for pronouns. Simple. Hard for them to learn English.
Do spell checkers exist in Japanese or Chinese software?
Not widely used but exists in China.Every Chinese character you can type on your screen exists. So ther is no such spelling checker like Latin languages, but similar checker for grammar and combanation exist.The Chinese version of Microsoft Office has already had such spell checker for both English and Chinese since I remembered.In some early version like 2007 or 2010, the spell checker or we say grammer checker is not so good. It works in some occasions like checking the wrong characters in a combined phrase, but mistakes often happen.The Chinese characters can be combined in countless ways, and some of them can be wrongly judged by the spell checker from Word. Especially when I type some accient poems or some traditional Chinese expressions, it is likely to have so many blue and red underlines marked.You may say traditional Chinese does disobey modern Chinese grammer, but the truth is ancient Chinese idioms are really widely used till now and shouldn’t be judged by present grammer.But right now it works better on Word 2016. Grammer mistakes checking and adjusting advices are helpful, mistakes happen, but much less.I suppose Mr. Microsoft has spend some time on Chinese learning. :)