One of the ways I teach students to parse a long and/or grammatically-complex sentence in Chinese is to get them to pull out what I call “the skeleton”: just the main message, without the subordinates / extra information (the when / where / how / etc.). I call it “the telegram principle”: if you don’t have enough money for the extras, then just convey the minimal essentials. This way, once the key message is in place, they can see how the rest (subordinates) slot in.
I was explaining this to Stanislav, my 14-year-old student, saying, “Pretend you’re sending a telegram, and you don’t have enough money for the whole message. As a telegram is charged by the word, just go for the skeleton message.”
He said: “Couldn’t you just join the words together, so that you just pay for one word?”
(London, 2017)
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