I've been helping my boyfriend learn Mandarin and we've been using the Michel Thomas method. I used it before with Arabic and really liked how you learn sentence structure and from there can build on the complexity of the sentences. He's almost done with all 8 Mandarin cd's and after spending many skype sessions going over the lessons with him and helping to clarify a few pronunciations and reasons for usage of one phrase over another, I think he has the sentence structure down pretty well. It's what I love about Mandarin, it's pretty logical and there are few, if any, exceptions to rules. He was doubting his progress with Mandarin, but I told him since he has a good grasp of sentence structure, he knows a good number of verbs and other basics, it mostly is a matter of learning vocabulary now. After he gets through those basics of Mandarin, it is his choice whether or not he wants to continue on to learn the other more subtle nuances of the language. But really, after a month of self taught language learning along with clarifications from me, he can pretty much just go to Google Translate to find the vocabulary he wants and create basic to somewhat complex sentences.
Idioms and subtle meanings, the correct way to approach the language based on situation and custom, now that's another story.
The basic sentence structure of Chinese is:
Subject - Time - Place - Prepositional Phrase -Object
A note on time. Depending on whether you want to emphasize the time or subject, time can go before or after subject.
So a sentence like, "I want to go to Beijing tomorrow with my boyfriend" is ordered as, "I and my boyfriend tomorrow want to go to Beijing."
Whenever my boyfriend is confronted with more complex sentences, I remind him to break the sentence apart and follow the sentence structure and he always can find his way.
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