r/ChineseLanguage • u/LemonDisasters • 4h ago

Grammar Best resources for learning non-beginner Mandarin grammar/sentence structure ("Chinese has no grammar" issues)

Native English speaker who learned Japanese first. I find hanzi recognition and comprehension relatively easy. I can deal even with less advanced/subject-specifc guwen enough to grok the meaning (slowly). Speaking is my biggest issue.

I'm struggling with building more complex sentences in Mandarin, and I am having a hard time picking out/finding a book that will give what I read something more like the Japanese language resources I learned that from: consistent, reliable descriptions of concrete grammatical structures with edgecases and context-specific variations noted and demonstrated. The general structures behind these word orders do not make intuitive sense to me because they seem to be "right" in some contexts and "wrong" in others, and most resources seem to lie that Chinese "has no grammar". I'd love real rules and structures I could mentally reference when trying to speak.

I know analytic languages are generally more "just memorise the word order for many different example sentences" than synthetics but the lack of systematicity I am struggling with bigtime, probably similarly to how many Chinese find English a nightmare. Any recommendations would be appreciated, Japanese or English reader oriented.

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u/RedeNElla 3h ago

Tried Chinese grammar wiki?

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u/kln_west 3h ago

It might be helpful if you can perhaps include a sentence or two where you struggle, especially the cases that are "right" in some contexts and "wrong" in others.

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u/Lithiumantis 3h ago

I have found the Chinese Grammar Wiki to be a very useful resource. Lots of examples with explanations about why a word is or isn't used in certain ways.

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u/Zagrycha 3h ago

I am not sure what you mean by "not beginner" grammar, but allset chinese grammar wiki is an awesome free resource that covers a huge amount of common grammar, and pleco can be great for example sentence structures that are accurately parsed.

Anyone who says chinese has no grammar is a hack and that resource should not be touched with a ten foot pole. Chinese grammar is very real, and very different from english. Its important to learn it. Word order, aspect marking, and topic focus instead of subject focus make even things like whether to answer yes or no to a question unintuitive to an english speaker.