The long quest for a fuller explanation of 和 (he)

和

When I first started learning Chinese in 1998, I learned the word 和 (hé) as a way to express “and.” However, it was an “and” with limitations; it was not to be used to connect sentences or clauses. For example, none of these sentences could be expressed with :

– Today we’re going to learn how to hold the pen and learn the stroke order for one character.
– You get a new job, and and I’ll stop living in the treehouse.
– He ran into the street and got hit by a garbage truck.

So the way I learned was as a way of connecting nouns and noun phrases. Not verbs. Different from English, but not too tough, right?

The only problem was that after moving to China in 2000, from time to time I would encounter examples of what were clearly verbs being linked by . It didn’t happen often, but often enough to bug me. Worst yet, although some Chinese teachers had told me to only use to connect nouns, others told me could be used to connect verbs too. This conflicting advice was frustrating, and in the end I decided to ignore the non-noun uses of because you don’t need to use for verbs; there are other ways to link verbs.

Fast forward to this year.

The Chinese Grammar Wiki has a beginner-level article on that until very recently stated that is used to connect nouns and noun phrases but not verbs. Then someone on Reddit politely called us out on it with a very good counter-example.

Now that I have a team of Chinese teachers at AllSet Learning, I can have one of my lead teachers properly research the issue. She didn’t find much, and did extensive examination of 和 in use in various corpora. Then we also discussed the issue with a group at a recent teacher training session.

The result is that we now have a new page on advanced uses of . It’s still good to start with the basic uses, but more advanced learners can jump into the other messy details.

The bad news is that the issue of when you can and can’t use with verbs is still quite murky. The wiki page needs more examples and more references. (If anyone knows of any research papers or books that touch on this issue, please share! See the Chinese Grammar Wiki page for more details.)

But the good news is that it’s really great to see the Chinese Grammar Wiki expanding in this way, through feedback and the dedication of AllSet Learning’s academic team. It’s not every day you get to see a free resource like this blossom, and it’s even more gratifying to be part of it.

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John Pasden

John is a Shanghai-based linguist and entrepreneur, founder of AllSet Learning.

Comments

  1. John Pasden, you’re my hero.

  2. Pete Braden Says: March 12, 2015 at 11:20 am

    活許慎!厲害!

  3. Apparently Google Scholar doesn’t actually function when searching by Chinese character. Surely the research is out there somewhere … but then again my searches for Chinese phonetics have so consistently come up with very few results that I’m beginning to think that there’s a lot less out there than you’d expect, even on the descriptive side.

    Ever thought of publishing a paper on it?

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