Chinese learns English

"We use English everywhere, every day. It is the second official language in Malaysia." Break complicated sentences into multiple shorter sentences. "Everyday" is an adjective, as in "this is an everyday shirt, but I need something special for the party."

"However, we do not always speak it perfectly. Our mother tongue always influences the way we write and speak English." Again, break that sentence into smaller parts. There's no need to say both "perfectly" and "correctly" because they mean almost the same thing. "Tongue" and "language" mean the same thing so you shouldn't use them both.

"English has been . . . ." because you're talking about the present time, not a situation that existed in the past but is no longer current. But you should change that sentence into something more straightforward: "We have developed our own local style of English." Notice that I put it into the active voice instead of the passive. We did it, it didn't just happen at random. This is a more direct way of writing and it maintains the reader's attention. The rest of the sentence needs cleaning up too. "That" is a relative pronoun that shows that "English" is still a component of the next clause, so "it" is redundant. You also don't need "can" because we actually do call it that. So the sentence now reads, " We have developed our own style of English, which you call broken English." "Broken English" is a rude thing to say, so in polite company we use the French word patois, pronounced pa-TWA, to mean "a dialect of a language, with non-standard rules, spoken by a community for whom it is a second language."

I think you meant to say "we know what we mean." Always read your own typing (we call this "proofreading") to find errors.

You're still having trouble using prepositions correctly. "You" is the subject of the sentence so putting "to" in front of it is wrong. Since you know there are both Americans and Britons here you should use "and" instead of "or," and you've left those two adjectives hanging in the air without a noun. Finally, "misunderstood" is past tense and you have to use present tense after "may." So the sentence is "You American and British people may misunderstand what we say." Notice that the correct way is actually shorter and easier.

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I understand that you speak that way among yourselves and I would not criticize it. However, you asked for advice on writing proper English for all of your friends here, most of whom speak English as their primary language. So I'm just trying to do what you asked, and teach you how to write like a native speaker. Oh, and you misspelled "grammar."

The expression is "word for word," you misspelled "tongues." I will assume that the plural "tongues" is correct, since some of you speak Chinese at home and other speak Malaysian. Is that true? Anyway, this sentence is, "We always do word-for-word translation directly from our mother tongues."

"Talking to a dog." Speaking English in an informal situation, in which you're expressing your feelings, rather than attending a meeting with your manager, ordering business supplies from another corporation, or explaining to a customer how your product works, will limit the number of words you use, so that small number of words will become more familiar to your brain. The next time you need one it will pop up automatically and you won't need to translate. You will also be able to slow down and think about using correct grammar, and that will get you into a good habit.

As I said, it would be even better to speak English at home with your wife. Does she speak it as well as you do?

But this is the only place where I can see your writing and help you, so you should slow down and try to write correctly. You have a professional instructor here, who is willing to help you for free. Do you want to take advantage of this fabulous opportunity?

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That's because "though" and "but" are both subordinating conjunctions. A subordinating conjunction introduces a subordinate clause. Every sentence has to have one primary clause, otherwise it has no focus. Chinese syntax bears a superficial resemblance to English syntax (in contrast to Japanese, for example) so we both feel fairly comfortable with the other's language, but they still have major differences. Chinese doesn't have the same kind of conjunctions as English. In fact, personally I don't even regard them as conjunctions. I think they behave more like verbs.

No one "decided" the rules. That happens in places like France, where an Academy makes rules, or Germany, where people like rules and allow their scholars or their rulers to tell them how to speak. English is more democratic. The people decide how we want our language to work, and if it isn't logical nobody cares.

 

Academia is always a generation behind actual use, but they always catch up.

Journalists actually have more influence than scholars, because they have more readers. They started writing stoopid shit like "Mr. Jones' hat" and even "Mr. Marquez' car" back in the 1980s, as a way to leave a little bit more free space for advertising. They stopped, but I still see a few people writing that way.

When a student is writing a thesis for his professor he'll use the MLA Stylebook. But the rest of the time people usually refer to the Associated Press Stylebook, or the in-house manual of a major newspaper.

 

A better translation for dan shi would be "nonetheless," which is an adverb rather than a conjunction.

You can't apply the rules of one language to another. For one thing, as I just noted above, words don't translate exactly. For another, as I have noted throughout this thread, all languages don't have the same parts of speech. English (and most of the Indo-European language family) has nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, articles, conjunctions, prepositions and interjections. Chinese doesn't have those same categories. What we translate as adjectives are really verbs. Kuai translates better as "to hurry," rather than "fast." Ta kuai translates easily as "he hurries," but instead we translate it as "he is fast" and pretend that there is an imaginary verb "is" in the sentence. Chinese has no articles. Chinese doesn't really have prepositions. Ta zai jia li translates quite nicely as "He occupies (the) house('s) interior," but instead we change it to "He is in the house," pretending that li is an adverb instead of a noun. Ni dao jia lai means "You approach house (and) come" but we change it to "You come to house (or "home)," pretending that dao is a preposition instead of a verb.

But Chinese has "measure words"-- tiao, zhang, ben, ge, wei, etc., that must be used properly and vary depending on the particular noun being counted or measured.

Every language has different rules. In Spanish you must say Yo no veo nada, "I don't see nothing," whereas in English a double negative is always an error.

As Walter explained, "fish" is a very strange word, although we have a few others like that, such as "deer." Don't let it bother you. You have strange words too. Why do we say liang tiao ma for "two horses" instead of er tiao ma?

Not people who speak other Indo-European languages. Most of them have nominative and accusative cases for pronouns, and many even have them for nouns. In Latin, canis is nominative for "dog," but canem is accusative. If "dog" is the object of the verb instead of the subject, it must be put in the accusative case, just like "me" instead of "I."

Americans sometimes get confused and do that, such as "Me and my friend are going to the movies." But it's regarded as the language of the uneducated.

We already discussed that stylebook. I suggested that it is too advanced for Saint at this point, since he is still learning basic grammar and syntax.

I have always been a good writer, even in high school. When I write professionally I occasionally check Strunk & White to make sure I'm right, but I always am.

A few things like the serial comma ("blood, sweat, and tears" instead of "blood, sweat and tears") are controversial. Apparently the Americans think the British enforce it and call it "the Oxford comma", and they think it's an Americanism and call it "the Harvard comma."