I’m a bit of a sucker for Venn diagrams. When I was recently asked by a student about the Chinese modal verbs 会, 能, and 可以 (all of which can be translated into English as “can”), I recalled a nice Venn diagram on the topic and dug it up.
What creates the most confusion with these three modal verbs is not that they can all be translated into “can” in English. The problem is that they are usually …
Intermediate students of Chinese will be familiar with the following pattern:
V + 不起 = can’t afford to V
V + 得起 = can afford to V
This pattern is most commonly about money, the typical example being 买不起 (can’t afford to buy).
The pattern is fairly productive, so you’ll see it for lots of different verbs (and not always about money), but recently I heard a new one. A friend was saying that she was going to eat at …
你中文说得很好！ You speak Chinese very well.
This is a compliment paid nearly every person with the guts to try out his spoken Mandarin skills in China. All you gotta do is try.
But the simple sentence above contains a grammar pattern which students of Mandarin Chinese take quite some time getting the hang of. Translating word for word, a beginner student will take this English sentence:
You speak Chinese very well.
…and render it as this sentence:
×你说
…
I’ve been asked many times: “Which is harder to learn, Chinese or Japanese?” Well, the latest time finally inspired me to make this graphic. I think it’s pretty self-explanatory, but some notes will follow anyway. For me, the major points of comparison come down to just pronunciation and grammar.
This week in grad school class about Chinese grammar, we covered the topic of grammaticalization. Of interest to me was one paper in which the author made a case for the demonstrative pronoun 这 beginning to take on the role of definite article in Beijing dialect. In this usage, 这 is pronounced “zhe” (neutral tone). The author also examined 那, and the same thing is not happening.
This made me think of English. We have the demonstrative pronouns …
OK, this is an entry that’s likely to bore many readers to tears. You have been warned.
While I don’t find the study of Chinese grammar remarkably stimulating, there are some aspects of it that catch my interest. It’s kind of cool how Chinese parts of speech don’t fit so neatly into our Western designations. When China first starting applying Western linguistics to Chinese, Chinese syntax was forced into the Western mold. Over the years Chinese scholars have decided that …
This week I’m finally getting around to writing my two remaining final papers for last semester. Classes don’t start until something like the 27th though (I think). One of my assignments is to revise my paper on Chomsky according to my professor’s comments. That shouldn’t be too hard, except that she left a few questions on my paper that would seem to warrant entire essays of their own in order to answer. (Ah, she won’t remember what she wrote on …
Did you ever have to diagram in gradeschool? Remember how that worked? Here’s an example:
They mixed the dough quickly, put it into the oven, and waited.
It’s intended to help the mind better grasp parts of speech and how they relate to each other in a sentence. I don’t think it really helps much, though. It seems more like demented grammarians forcing their “fun” on innocent children.
Here’s a quote from Gertrude Stein: “I really do not know …
John has lived in China for
11.8
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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