Tips Miniseries (4/9): Keep Your Pronouns to Yourself, Please

As you are probably aware, Chinese very much likes to avoid repetition of information that has already been made clear from the context – particularly pronoun words like 我 I, 你 you and 他 he / 她 she.  Many English-speaking students, however, copy their English a little too literally into their Chinese and excessively pepper their sentences with superfluous 我、你、他 and 她s. The following are 3 instances where you can safely get rid of those extra pronouns and remove that ‘English-style’ awkwardness from your Chinese:

(i) when using words which inherently relate to yourself e.g. 同学 ‘(my) classmates’ instead of always saying 我的同学, or relatives e.g. 妈妈 and 哥哥, rather than 我的妈妈 and 我的哥哥.

(ii) When you have two clauses linked by conjunctions, like 因为…所以, 不但…而且, 如果…就… and the subject is the same in both parts e.g. 我如果见到他,我就告诉他 is more naturally said as 我如果见到他就告诉他.

(iii) When you have several verbs in a row e.g. 他说他不要见到我 is less smooth than 他说不要见到我.

发布者:安天老师

语言和音乐的混合物

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