“So, are you a tennis player?”

unless they did mean it in some kind of professional sense (or possibly in a sarcastic sense…why else would they be carrying the racquet?). Otherwise, I’d have thought you’d be more likely to ask: “Do you play?”, “are you going to play now?”, “are you any good?”, or “is tennis your hobby?”, or something along those lines.

Its like if you met someone going to KTV (karaoke), you probably wouldn’t ask “Are you a singer (歌手)?”, you would more likely say “Do you like to sing?”(喜歡唱歌嗎?).

The other part of the problem is that you’re trying to directly translate an (already vague) english phrase. The way round this is maybe to first really figure out what you are trying to ask the person, and then (hopefully!) it would be easier to come up with the chinese translation.

I’ve found that by really getting to the bottom of the meaning of a phrase, and cutting out all the vagueness that English lets you include, this method does often help you come up with a chinese translation that at least makes sense. Also, by getting to the key point of what you are trying to say, it is easier to try wording it in different ways, some of which may be easier to translate into chinese too. This is much easier to do when you’re writing, but maybe with practice you can also do it fast enough for speaking.

(By the way, I’m British, so maybe my comment about asking that particular question wouldn’t be relevant in US-english.)

Very good post. Learning Chinese is really horrendous. I agree with Chad, for a beginner, learning to say the simplest things in a natural way is difficult. What a language.

She said that she wouldn’t ask 你会打网球吗？ because it would be awkward if they actually didn’t know how to play. I thought that was interesting.

The native-speaker part of me never thought much about the conventions for “-er”-ing in Chinese. The still-learning-Chinese part of me had to click through 搭讪 to know what that meant.

Enlightening, entertaining, and educational

This is a great post. The challenge of Chinese is that it’s grammar is more descriptive than prescriptive. You could know all the essential grammar points — stative verbs, when to use 了, etc. — and still have a hard time formulating sentences that don’t sound wrong, especially if your education is from textbooks instead of natural speech. Some people do just fine picking up Chinese just from frequent exposure. These are the people that say Chinese is easy because it doesn’t have verb conjugation. But I do best when language points can be distilled into a set of rules. And if I suspect there is an implicit pattern, I’ll spend the time working it out.