I'll answer jutfrank and ems' questions altogether because there are many.
Are you really only wanting to know whether these sentences are natural. Could you tell us what you mean by 'natural'?
Yes. When I say "natural", I mean native speakers agree that a sentence is grammatical and idiomatic (not including any idioms), native speakers will use in daily life. Not Chinglish. I'm not saying that sort of naturalness all of you have talked about for a while. Any sentences could be natural in the right context. Is it true? "Good good study, day day up". Will this one sound natural to a possible context? That's just Chinglish and many people use it in China for fun. The problem is that many sentences like this one are seen in some of my notebooks. To my surprise, some of them are okay in English! I am not always using Google and soon I'll be banned because of an important meeting in Beijing. Let me tell you honestly, I use Google to check my sentences and I already deleted many; I don't like taking advantage of you. I just want to learn.
Please tell us exactly what your goal is.
I still have four students whom I've been teaching right now. They use Chinglish textbooks at schools. They learned bad English before they met me. If I learn more about this language, I can help them more. I also sometimes teach adults students who want to take IELTS test (spoken English), I just don't want to teach them Chinglish.
Did you write them down because they used a construction with which you were unfamiliar?
Yes I can to your first question. Yes to this.
Did you write them down because you thought they were wrong or because you assumed they were right and you wanted to memorise some usage or other from them?
I thought they were right because at that time my English was worse than now. I remember at that time I wanted to learn how to say something in English, I first said it in Chinese and I found some sentences expressing my thoughts in some dictioanries (iciba.com/dict.cn) and I wrote them down and I read these sentences. At that time I didn't know I could learn English well online by using forums like this one and some other ones. I remember I bought a big paperback dictionaries with many sentences there and if I wanted to learn how to use a word, I looked it up and wrote down the sentences beside them, because the dictionary was edited by a native speaker (now it turned out that many sentences are wrong).
"Natural" can be subjective and frequently depends on context. I really don't know if you're learning anything from these threads.
I also want to delete those sentences that are old-fashioned, ungrammatical, unnatural (native speakers don't say it or use it in their whole lives.). I think most of the sentences are grammatical but maybe some of them are natural while others are not. I also explained the naturalness in response to jutfrank's questions above. Feel free to ask me any questions.
As for the point of starting these threads, hmm, is it wrong to know if a sentence is wrong or right? I think it's not wrong but stupid. But I hope you can forgive me and trust me, I'm doing something really important for my students and myself. Chinese students don't learn a sentence in a context, just a sentence without a context. Also, they are still memorizing words and phrases but they will only, to say the most, in some sentences but not, say, an article, a bigger context. Now, I offer them full context but I need to explain when they ask me if one sentence is wrong or right. Those sentences are given by their teachers, bad textbooks at schools, etc.
Thank you very much.
