Jeff - Seem to remember it was something like that. I would not pick up stuff like that through exposure alone. I read about it in a grammar book once. However, perhaps this is not necessary to know for conversation. At the writing level obviously that is important and this is an area I want to be good at.
I’ve seen examples where the meaning of the sentence depended a lot on where 了 (or any adjective) was placed. Tricky as hell to grasp (“at once”) even if I get the rule/pattern on a silver plate, but I prefer that to having to pick it up through “osmosis”. When have you had “enough” exposure?.
It seems to me that the absence of the article in Chinese simply means that they do without the article and the question of “a” or “the” really only comes up when translating into a language that has definite and indefinite articles. Where they need to make the distinction in Chinese they just use “一个” or ”这个“。In translating we can usually decide which will work better based on the English context.
It would be interesting, in discussing these examples, to see some more context to get an idea of what exactly we are talking about.
I certainly agree that reading grammar books can help us notice things in the language we are studying. I find that trying to remember grammar rules is elusive, and most things learned during the time I spend studying grammar just stays briefly in my short term memory. Only with enough exposure do these descriptions of what happens in the language start to make sense, as I remember having come across the language patterns described by the explanations. Since I need to reread the rules often, I prefer a very short grammar book that can be skimmed every now and then, or in the case of Chinese, don’t bother.
In fact I generally am more inspired to read more about history, or literature, or just communicate, and end up spending very little time on grammar. If I were a professional translator, I think things would be different.
It all depends on our preferences and goals I guess.
Quote from Rimmintong and Po-Ching’s Comprehensive Grammar (Routledge, 2007) (which admittedly I had to dust off)
“in a language without definite or indefinite articles like Chinese, the reference of unmarked nounce is influenced by a number of factors such as context, sentence type, the position of the noun in relation to the verb in the sentence and the nature of the verb itself” 1.2.1.
书已经环了 the book/books have already been returned
我去借书 I am going to/ went to borrow a book/some books
孩子回来了The child/children has/have come back
In some cases however a post-verbal unmarked noun may be part of given informationand terefore be part of definite reference
她去照顾孩子 she went to look after the children
and so it goes on.
This is just though one example that shows that although a language does not have noun declensions and verb conjugations, these are then often expressed in other ways. Also word order is important in Chinese for that reason, and I have often come across people who were less able to make themselves understood as they had not grasped that bit. But maybe they just need more exposure.
Marianne,
In every one of the examples you provided, the translation into English, including the use or not articles, is clear from the context. I doubt if you can write rules for that, and if you did, I doubt that they would help.