Not sure if you're native Chinese or not, but... As a native English speaker learning to speak some Chinese since living moving to China, I find I topic-front a

Not sure if you're native Chinese or not, but... As a native English speaker learning to speak some Chinese since living moving to China, I find I topic-front as often as I can. Not sure if I'm doing it because it's novel and not clumsy as in English, or whether the language itself encourages that style of speech. > throwing words around can definitely get you farther if the grammar is simple than if it’s complex. But you run the risk of arriving at a structure with a meaning you didn’t intend, and I’d rather just try to use correct grammar I'd argue pauses, like tones and stress and other "prosodic features", have just an important place as grammar in natural languages. And... not sure if you're a programmer (this IS Hacker News after all) but... computer languages could also use an equivalent of pauses, stresses, and tones alongside grammar to communicate semantics to the computer and/or other readers. If whitespace and newlines is like pauses then Python uses a combination of pauses (i.e whitespace) and grammar to communicate semantics.