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I tried sentence ordering exercises from TCB for HSK 5. Below the second sentence was considered wrong. Is it simply unidiomatic or is it wrong? Does the problem come from the preferred placement of 和⋯結成連理, or the preferred placement of 於? enter image description here

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  • Nothing wrong with your sentence ordering.
    – dan
    Mar 13, 2018 at 0:51
  • What's the "right answer" the software says supposed to be!?
    – Pikachu620
    Mar 14, 2018 at 1:14
  • @Pikachu620 it is pedroskis number 4.
    – Ludi
    Mar 14, 2018 at 7:59
  • Please see answer below.
    – Pikachu620
    Mar 15, 2018 at 1:34
  • 1
    A side note, please do not treat「於」as the traditional form of「于」. They both exist in their own right but merely with hugely overlapping functions. There's nothing wrong with using「于」in Traditional Chinese, and many classics from before the Han Dynasty, if rendered faithfully, will use「于」. Interchanging/replacing the two inappropriately can get confusing when reading.
    – dROOOze
    Mar 15, 2018 at 9:09

3 Answers 3

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I would say the following are all acceptable and have the same meaning, but I prefer 4.:

  1. 徐良泉于1937年和妻子结成连理。 (结了婚)

  2. 徐良泉和妻子于1937年结成连理。 (结了婚)

  3. 徐良泉和妻子在1937年结成连理。 (结了婚)

  4. 徐良泉和妻子1937年结成连理。 (结了婚)

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徐良泉於1937年和妻子結婚

In this sentence, [徐良泉] is the subject. and the rest of the sentence "於1937年和妻子結婚" is in order

徐良泉和妻子於1937年結婚

In this sentence [徐良泉和妻子] is the subject, and the rest of the sentence "於1937年結婚" is in order

're-organise sentence into correct sentence order' here seem referring to the correct order of the four sentences, not the word orders in each sentence.

  1. The couple now have children, grand children and great grand children

  2. He married his wife in 1937

  3. The old man was born in Jiangsu

  4. This hundred years old couple have been through a lot of hardship

The correct order of these four sentences is 3, 2, 1, 4

The goal of this exercises is to use your comprehension skill to construct a logically coherent paragraph. All you need to do is to figure out the correct time-line.

None of the sentence is grammatically incorrect

Edit:

Ludi wrote:

Thank you. The goal is to arrange the words of the sentence, but I had already done that. There is no possibility to choose the order.

May be they think 和 in "於1937年妻子結婚" should had been 與. As in "徐良泉於1937年妻子結婚"(which is a better preposition when 徐良泉 was the subject)

presuming 和 is incorrect (or not the optimal choice), the only option is to rearrange the sentence into "徐良泉和妻子於1937年結婚" and make "徐良泉和妻子" the subject.

A likely explanation is the author already set the answer as "徐良泉和妻子於1937年結婚" but overlooked the fact that 和(and) can function as 與 (with) too. That meant there could be two correct answers, but the author only allowed one.

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  • Thank you. The goal is to arrange the words of the sentence, but I had already done that. There is no possibility to choose the order of whole sentences, but it would be a good exercise :)
    – Ludi
    Mar 12, 2018 at 23:01
  • See the edition at the bottom of my post
    – Tang Ho
    Mar 12, 2018 at 23:15
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Then I'm sorry to say that that's the LEAST correct answer!

Now I'm just speaking from a native Chinese speaker (Taiwan), the 4th answer 徐良泉和妻子1937年结成连理 feels like it had missed something!

It was like saying

John and Kate married 1937

instead of

John and Kate married in 1937

Did you see the difference!?

That software is made by people, and so is NOT perfect!

Try NOT to take too much of it to heart!!!

As long as you keep practicing it and, most importantly, keep using it. (EVEN IF IT'S WRONG!) Then the time will come when you got the AHA! moment and can feel the "rightness" of the language!

That's how I learned English!

Keep at it! Good luck! 加油!

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