Writing an Essay for Chinese Beginners
Writing an essay for Chinese beginners could be very hard. At the initial stage, students are short of vocabularies, not to mention to form a meaningful sentence structure, a paragraph, or even an essay. However, beginners can still write a short essay. Here are some tips.
I take an example from my students' mid-term assignment. They are college students who come to take this three-credit elective course. They have only learned six weeks of Mandarin Chinese and were asked to form a short essay by using 10 New Words listed from Lesson 1 to 3 from their textbook titled "New Practical Chinese Reader", published by Beijing Language and Cultural University Press. At the mid-term, students have to make an oral presentation based on their essay.
Before the task of writing an essay, I suggest students can group first all the new words according to their grammar terms. Each word can be categorized either as pronouns, proper nouns, nouns on persons, common nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, or questions pronouns & particles. From the clustering group list organized below, we can find beginners learn first the nouns especially pronouns and nouns regarding the family members. Very few of verbs and adjectives are introduced at this stage. For the first lesson, students only learn a couple of simple greeting sentences such as 你好。你好吗？你呢？And the responding sentences respectively are 你好；我很好； and 也很好！We can see the positive sentences are all the adjectival predicate after the subject 你。 It is important to remember the "是 is“ word is always omitted after the subject. In lesson 2, the subject is extended to 爸爸妈妈 (dad/mom)，and the pronouns become 他们（they)。 男朋友(boyfriend) is also used as a subject, so pronoun is replaced as 他（he). The adjective 忙 (busy) is included in this lesson, so we got to be careful not to employ "是 is/are" when forming the adjectival predicate to describe the subject. (to be continued)
I take an example from my students' mid-term assignment. They are college students who come to take this three-credit elective course. They have only learned six weeks of Mandarin Chinese and were asked to form a short essay by using 10 New Words listed from Lesson 1 to 3 from their textbook titled "New Practical Chinese Reader", published by Beijing Language and Cultural University Press. At the mid-term, students have to make an oral presentation based on their essay.
Before the task of writing an essay, I suggest students can group first all the new words according to their grammar terms. Each word can be categorized either as pronouns, proper nouns, nouns on persons, common nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, or questions pronouns & particles. From the clustering group list organized below, we can find beginners learn first the nouns especially pronouns and nouns regarding the family members. Very few of verbs and adjectives are introduced at this stage. For the first lesson, students only learn a couple of simple greeting sentences such as 你好。你好吗？你呢？And the responding sentences respectively are 你好；我很好； and 也很好！We can see the positive sentences are all the adjectival predicate after the subject 你。 It is important to remember the "是 is“ word is always omitted after the subject. In lesson 2, the subject is extended to 爸爸妈妈 (dad/mom)，and the pronouns become 他们（they)。 男朋友(boyfriend) is also used as a subject, so pronoun is replaced as 他（he). The adjective 忙 (busy) is included in this lesson, so we got to be careful not to employ "是 is/are" when forming the adjectival predicate to describe the subject. (to be continued)
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(A) 你好。
(B) 你好。 (A) 你好吗？ (B) 我很好。(correct) 你呢？ (B) 我是很好。(wrong) (A) 也很好。(correct) (A) 也是很好。(wrong) (A) 你爸爸妈妈好吗？ (B) 他们很好。(correct) (B) 他们是很好。(wrong) (B) 他们都很好。(correct） (B) 她们是都很好。(wrong) |
(A) Hello./How do you do?
(B) Hello./How do you do? (A) How are you? (B) I am very good. And you? (A)(I'm) Also very good. (A) How are your dad and mom? (B) They are very good. (B) They are all very good. |
Pronouns
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Proper Nouns
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Nouns on Persons
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Common Nouns
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Verbs
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Adjectives
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Adverbs
QPr & Particles
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