As an analytical approach plays a major role in the learning of Chinese language, you are required to have some knowledge of Chinese grammar and grammatical terminology. One of the simplest ways of doing this is to use two axes to make a cross, with the two sides dividing the components of a sentence up for parsing. This will help you to understand the relationship between the components.
The following two examples demonstrate how to parse.
"These old methods are completely absurd." | |
---|---|
Subject |
Predicate |
methods (noun) |
← are (verb) absurd (adjective) |
↑ ↑ |
↑ |
these (specifier) | old (adjective) |
completely (adverb) |
"We teach our students at Oxford using an old fashioned method." | |
---|---|
Subject | Predicate |
We (pronoun) | ← teach (verb) students (noun) |
at (prep)Oxford (prop n.) our (adj) | |
|
|
using (verb) method >(noun) | |
|
|
an (article) old-fashioned (adj) |
It is a good idea to take out a few sentences for analysis from each lesson by using this method; it will be of great benefit to your reading skills when you are at a more advanced stage of learning.