New blog address

I’ve moved this blog to a new website that is more or less up and running.  Since I’ll probably keep fiddling with it for a while, I might as well just point you to it now.  If you’re subscribed you will need to update your subscription.

Grammar notes: 是 … 的 without the 是?

A while back, I wrote about how the 是 … 的(shì … de) construction is used for focus. I even went so far as to look it up in a grammar book, where I was informed that this construction could be used without the 是(shì). I was not the only one to find this claim a bit sketchy. So, for our further edification, here’s an example of a sentence where 的(de) is used for focus without a 是(shì).  The following two sentences are identical except for the final 的(de). (For the non-character-readers among you, please note that this is not the same character as the medial 得(de).)

她	把	房间	打扫	得	干干净净	的
tā	bǎ	fángjiān	dǎsǎo	de	gāngānjìngjìng	de
she	ba	room	clean (v.)	de	clean (adj. red.)	DE

‘She cleaned the room until it was REALLY CLEAN.’ (focus on really clean)

她	把	房间	打扫	得	干干净净
tā	bǎ	fángjiān	dǎsǎo	de	gāngānjīngjīng
she	ba	room	clean	de	clean (red.

‘She CLEANED the room until it was really clean.’ (focus on cleaned)

In the first sentence, the final 的(de) places the focus on 干干净净(gāngānjìngjìng) ‘very clean’, the result of the action.  In the second sentence, the focus falls instead on the action itself, 打扫 (dǎsǎo) ‘clean’.  I assume that this is the natural place for the focus to fall in this sentence. The 把(bǎ), I think, takes emphasis away from 房间(fángjiān) ‘room’, and 她(tā) ‘she’ is presumably given information, so also a poor candidate for focus. So the added 的(de) in the first sentence is a focus marker; it draws the focus away from its natural placement–and in this case, at least, places it on the information that immediately precedes it.

So it looks like the book was right about one thing.  的(de) can be used for focus without a 是(shì) in sight. But is this in fact an example of a 是 … 的(shì … de) construction without the 是(shì)? If it is, then we should be able to add 是(shì) into the first sentence somewhere and (and this is the really important bit) the meaning and focus should be the same. How does our example sentence measure up? It is possible to put a 是(shì) into the sentence, but only in one location, at the beginning. The resulting sentence does have a good focus-shifting 是 … 的 (shì … de) construction. However, the focus falls, not on 干干净净(gāngānjìngjìng) ‘very clean’, as it did in the first sentence, but rather on 她(tā) ‘she’:

是	她	把	房间	打扫	得	干干净净	的
shì	tā	bǎ	fángjiān	dǎsǎo	de	gāngānjìngjìng	de
be	she	ba	room	clean (v.)	de	clean (adj. red.)	DE

‘SHE cleaned the room until it was really clean.’ (focus on she)

So, grammar book, I hate to say it, but I think you’ve got it only half right. There is a 是 … 的(shì … de) construction, and it is used for focus. 的(de) can also be used for focus, but it doesn’t come from an underlying 是 … 的(shì … de) construction where the 是(shì) just happens to be omitted, or at least, not always. The two might be related, but they’re not the same thing.

Undoing the erhua

A while back, I mentioned in a comment that relating an erhua-ized word to the standard pronunciation you were taught isn’t so hard. But I should clarify–this only applies if you know what the “correct” pronunciation is or how to guess it. It’s not always straightforward. Some time ago, my teacher taught me the word for braid. It sounded like xiǎobiàr. Now I’d been studying the language long enough that I was pretty sure that neither bia nor biang were possible syllables, and so the biar had to have come from bian.

You might at this point be wondering why I care, since as long as I stay in this city, I’m highly unlikely to hear the standard pronunciation anyway. (Surely there wouldn’t be any other reason you’d wonder, right?) Dear reader, today is your lucky day, for I am about to explain. I wanted to make a flashcard on my computer with the characters on it. However, in order to type in Chinese, you need some method of transforming the 26 letters that show up on your keyboard into the thousands of characters in Chinese. The easiest method, at least for a beginner like me, is to use pinyin. My computer takes the (toneless) pinyin I type and generates a list of corresponding characters for me to choose from. I select the correct one, and presto, Chinese characters appear on my screen. But it only recognizes standard pronunciation. And now, back to the the erhua.

I dutifully typed xiaobian into the Chinese field of my flashcard and was given only one choice for characters: 小便. “Aha!” I thought to myself, “an easy one,” and I hit tab so that my nifty plugin would fill in the other fields for me. Unless you read Chinese, you too can imagine my surprise when the definition that appeared was not ‘braid’ but rather ‘urine’. Clearly something had gone drastically wrong. I tried searching a few dictionaries and found the same thing: xiaobian only yielded one word, and ‘braid’ wasn’t it.

So what happened? I had forgotten a couple of key facts. First, the r isn’t just a random sound; it’s actually a diminutive ending. As such, it often replaces another diminutive ending, -zi (子). In other words, it can wipe out an entire syllable and the end of the preceding syllable with one fell curl of the tongue. Fact number two: there’s a very strong preference in Chinese for two-syllable words. The result is that, if they knock a syllable off the end of the word, they’ll often tack one on to the beginning just for good measure. The syllable of choice? You guessed it: xiǎo(小) ‘small’. Once I looked up bianzi instead, I got the expected result.

In fact, I suspect some native speakers–specifically, those who aren’t highly educated and haven’t traveled widely–also have a bit of trouble with this in the opposite direction. For example, my husband, who speaks erhua-less Chinese, was inquiring in a restaurant about a fish that didn’t have too many bones (yúcì), and he wasn’t understood until he tried yúcìr. So next time your Chinese isn’t understood, try throwing in a few more r’s. Who knows, it might work. Unless you’re in Taiwan, in which case, I imagine it will just make things worse.

A useful verb they’ll never teach you: 摁

Lugging a one-year-old around with you is useful for language learning in any number of ways.  One of them is that people will verbalize things to a child that they wouldn’t otherwise bother to say out loud.  Not only that, but they’ll often repeat a word several times, using a short, simple phrase.  Thus it was that I learned the verb 摁 (èn) ‘to press’.

I have yet to come across this word in a textbook, and I can understand why.  After all, people don’t typically sit around talking about pressing things.  News articles aren’t written about the topic.  You don’t walk down the street and overhear someone saying “I pressed a really cool button the other day.”  No one updates their social media of choice with “Just pressed the button in the elevator.”  (Actually, they probably do.  This is why I don’t use Twitter.)

Just how uncommon is this word?  According to handy character frequency lists compiled by someone named Jun Da, it ranks number 4705 in general texts, showing up 249 times.  Other characters with the same frequency include 苁 “Boschniakia glabra” (whatever that might be), 铤 “ingot, big arrow, to walk fast”, and 涔 “overflow, rainwater, tearful”.  I don’t know how many characters were in the corpus he used, but for comparison, some higher ranked characters with their frequencies:

1 (的)- 7922684
10 (他)- 1595761
100 (实)- 368494
500 (列)-    82418
1000 (顶)- 31318
2000 (泡)-    7046
3000 (忖)-    1890
4000 (坂)-    576

Incidentally, the last one isn’t given a definition in Da’s list.  My own little pop-up dictionary defines it as a Japanese or non-standard version of another character.  And this character _still_ shows up almost twice as often as our poor little 摁. In what he terms informative texts, it fares even worse, ranking only #5907. It doesn’t make the HSK list. No wonder it’s not in my textbook.

My guess, though, is that it ranks much higher in actual spoken Chinese–just not in the type of spoken Chinese that anyone is likely to be able to collect for a corpus study.  Since I learned this word about a month ago, I’ve heard it in some number of situations:

-Press the button (in an elevator)
-Which button should I press? (on a cell phone, to take a picture)
-Do not press this button (on a remote control–the big red one that looks like it should be a power button.  I still don’t know what that button does, but I won’t press it.)
-Press the clasp to open it (on a necklace)

See?  Useful!  So … anyone want to borrow a one-year-old?

Hěn chōngming? or: Where have all the retroflexes gone?

The other day, I heard three people pronounce 聪明(cōngming) as chōngming.  So far as I know, all three are southerners.  This surprised me.  I’m not sure how widespread the retroflex initials (except r?) actually are, but I had been under the impression that southern dialects don’t have them.  My guess is that I didn’t actually discover a heretofore unobserved pronunciation of 聪明 but rather something like this:

Southerner #1–possibly a native Cantonese speaker–is reading a text out loud, gets to the word 聪明, and thinks to herself “how is this word pronounced in Mandarin?” She comes up with chōngming.  Southerner #2 continues reading and thinks to herself “phew, now I know I have to pronounce that word with a ‘ch’” and does likewise.  Southerner #3 is now really confident of her pronunciation and does the same.

But I’ve also been wondering lately–where do the native retroflex distinctions (the ones they insist all foreigners, and presumably all school children, learn to pronounce) actually exist?  I’m at the very edge of Dongbei, and my observation is that they come and go around here.  Sometimes, at least, they come for my benefit, but I think not always.  I’ve been wondering if there might be a sociolinguistic effect going on (e.g. retroflexes prove you’re educated, so use them when you want to impress someone.  Lack of retroflexes prove you’re cool, so don’t use them when you want to impress a different someone.  That sort of thing.)  Maybe someday when my Chinese is much better I’ll be able to answer that question.

But in the meantime, I’ve heard that retroflexes are a northern thing, and really, you can’t get much further north than Dongbei.  I’ve heard they came into the language under Manchurian influence–though I have no idea if this is true–but you can’t get much more Manchurian than Dongbei.  So if they’re not here, where are they?  Beijing? (A quick survey of recordings over at Beijing Sounds suggests that the answer is probably yes.) Anywhere else?

Beware of Chinese grammar

Some time ago, I started a series about common pitfalls for beginning Chinese learners.  I haven’t abandoned it.  I’m just a little slow.  I think point 2–assuming Chinese grammar is like English–doesn’t require a lot of elaboration.  This is a mistake made by beginning learners of any language.  This is the stage where learners wonder why they haven’t yet learned how to make plurals (Chinese doesn’t have them) or specify verb tenses (Chinese doesn’t have those either) or gender (nope, not obligatory anyway), or they insist on forcing these things into the language, since they are expressible.  Incidentally, I think this is the exact error that programs like Rosetta Stone make, but that’s another post for another time.

This quickly leads to the next problem–assuming Chinese grammar is like English, only easier.  You might even come across a more bizarre assumption: Chinese has no grammar.  Do yourself a favor and ignore all such statements.  Sure, if you’ve ever tried to learn a European language, then you rejoice in the fact that there’s no subject-verb agreement, no case marking, and no grammatical gender.   But there is grammar.  Basic word order is the same in Chinese and English–subject, then verb, then object.  Adjectives and possessives come before nouns.  So do relative clauses–that’s a bit different, but manageable.  Also, you’ve finally been convinced that you can leave out all the things I mentioned in the previous paragraph and still end up with a grammatical sentence, so you pretty much stop bothering to pay attention to them.   And since half the words, or pieces of words, in a sentence don’t really seem to be necessary anyway, you begin to think to yourself “Chinese is just like English, only I don’t have to worry about grammar, and I can leave half the words out of the sentence.  This is great!”  This causes you to quickly gain confidence and start practicing your newly acquired language skills.  Incidentally, that’s a good thing.  But beware–the day is coming when, unless you’re a language genius, you’ll realize that it’s not actually that simple.  You begin to realize, for example, that you consistently pick the wrong half of words to leave out when your teacher tells you things like “I can understand your meaning, but Chinese people wouldn’t say it that way” on a pretty much daily basis, and then she provides you with a correct sentence that is twice as long as the one you just uttered.  Your minimal language abilities are further confirmed when someone else you’ve been practicing on for a month suddenly tells you “You said that very clearly!” (你说得很清楚/nǐ shuō de hěn qīngchu) and you wonder to yourself what this says about everything else you’ve said to them.

And then there’s the grammar.  Basic Chinese grammar is quite similar to English.  But non-basic grammar, you begin to realize, bears much less resemblance (see, for example, my grammar notes series, or the aforementioned disappearing words phenomenon).   The more you see, the more you think–well, if you’ve taken syntax classes, anyway–that if Noam Chomsky had been born in China, minimalist syntax would never have come to be.   Things that ought to be units just don’t seem to behave like units.  Not only that, but all those grammatical things you decided you could just ignore … it turns out that people actually use them!  Sometimes there’s good reason to communicate some idea of how many nouns were involved in some action.  Sometimes there’s good reason to communicate some idea of whether that action is completed, recently started, in progress, or ongoing for a long time.  And guess what … Chinese lets you do it!  Or it would, anyway, if you hadn’t ignored that lesson since you assumed it was useless.

Again, there are no magic answers here–just a warning to keep an open mind and avoid being lulled into a false sense of language mastery.  The good news is, as I mentioned before, that most Chinese speakers seem to be remarkably willing to listen to their language being butchered, so don’t wait until you master it all to start practicing.  Butcher away!

Does Mandarin have dual pronouns?

Am I way off base in my analysis here, or does Chinese have dual pronouns that they just don’t ever teach you?  Since Mandarin has a perfectly good distinction between inclusive we (咱们/zánmen) and exclusive we (我们/wǒmen)–which I also have yet to come across in a textbook–I guess it shouldn’t surprise so much if other pronouns pop up too.

The words in question:

咱俩(zánliǎ) ‘we two, inclusive’–or more naturally, the two of us (you and me)

你俩(nǐliǎ) ‘you two’

他俩(tāliǎ) ‘they two’

So, are these words pronouns?  They are single words, as best as I can tell.  They sure look like pronouns to me.  But then why don’t they show up in any of the nice charts of Chinese pronouns I recall seeing?  I suppose it may be because their use isn’t obligatory–as far as I know, I can use 咱们/zánmen to refer to just you and me and no one else.  For that matter, I’ve used 我们/wǒmen plenty of times with this intended meaning, and no one seemed to be confused by it–maybe because not all dialects of Mandarin actually use 咱们/zánmen.  The other possibility is that they’re not actually pronouns–but if not, what are they?

For the record (these claims always get me in trouble, but I’m going to go ahead and say it anyway): there is no first person dual exclusive  pronoun–that is, there’s no such word as 我俩 (wǒliǎ).  If it did exist, it would mean something like the two of us (s/he and I, not you).  But it doesn’t exist.

Looking for suggestions …

Has anyone out there found a way to memorize vocabulary that isn’t completely tedious?  I don’t suppose so, but if you have, please let me know.  I’ve found myself drowning in vocabulary lately, and between that and a new textbook that’s a bit beyond my own opinion of my level (They’ve taken away my pinyin! They’ve taken away my English!), my inspiration for blogging seems to have dropped considerably.  I have a bunch of half written posts sitting around, but they all sound like they’re written by someone who’s spent far too long staring at flashcards, and I so far I have retained enough benevolence to avoid the need to extend that feeling to anyone else’s life.

I suppose the upside of all this memorization is that I actually find myself starting to have a chance of saying what I want to say or understanding what people say to me.  I still can’t have a real conversation of any length, but people don’t automatically give up on me and walk away.  I even had a proud moment where I contributed appropriately to a Chinese conversation among 6 or 7 people.  Ok, so my contribution was one word, but still, it answered the question they were discussing.  You have to start somewhere, right?

Grammar notes: 是…的 construction mysteries

I decided it was time to emerge from flashcard misery and keep this blog going.  So without further ado, a question from a reader that got buried in a comment section:

I’ve noticed that Taiwanese speakers (and maybe others) tack “de”s onto the ends of random sentences. I asked a Chinese friend what the rule for that was and she couldn’t say. So I thought “meh. I’ll just use it when it sounds right.” But according to her, my knowledge of a sentence sounding “right” is about as limited as the Royal Family’s gene pool. So is there a rule to this?
Thanks!

So I have a guess about what’s going on here.  It’s probably not a random sentence–at least, so far as I know, there’s not a particle that’s pronounced ‘de’, though my knowledge of such things is pretty limited.  I think what you’ll probably find is that somewhere in the sentence, there is also a ‘shì’ that appears to be random.  They go together.  However, while I’ve noticed that this is pretty common, I too am a bit puzzled about when to use it. Here’s an example of 是 … 的 (shì … de) in action:

我	是	周二	回来	的
wǒ	shì	zhōu’èr	huílái	de
I	am	Tuesday	return	de

What you wouldn’t say (but might think you should say if you’re anything like me in your Mandarin proficiency, or lack thereof) is:

我	周二	回来	了
wǒ	zhōu’èr	huílái	le
I	Tuesday	return	le

Now there might be one other important bit of data here–when I was discussing these two sentences with some friends, the context we were talking about was an answer to a question–When did you come back? So what I can’t tell you is whether, if you were just talking about your week, whether the second one might be acceptable.

I actually looked it up in a book (!) and am told that this construction is used for focus when talking about past events. In other words, I have to use the first sentence because I’m answering a question that specifically inquired about the time I came back, so I put the focus on the day. Apparently, if I understand the book correctly, I can put the focus on pretty much anything except the verb this way.  It’s sort of like saying in English “It’s Tuesday that I came back” or “It’s me who came back on Tuesday”, except it’s far more common in Chinese than English.  (Don’t even try to convince me that you’d say “It’s I who came back on Tuesday” in anything approaching a normal conversation.)

Those of you who speak better Chinese: Is this the answer to all mysteries? Or is there more to it than this?

And as long as we’re on the topic, here are a few other questions I have no answers to:

1. My book also says the 是 (shì) can be omitted–which makes me a little bit skeptical. If the whole point of the 是 (shì) is to tell you, by its placement in the sentence, what’s being focused, then how can you get away with deleting it?  Or would this actually just happen in speech where you use some sort of stress to show where the focus is?
2. Why the 的(de), anyway?  This 的 is normally used to show that something is modifying a noun–it follows possessives, relative clauses, and adjectives.  I fail to see the connection.  Is there one?

Words in Chinese

Due to popular demand (well, ok, one question, but hey, I take what I can get around here), I’ve decided to start off my “pitfalls for foreigners learning Chinese” series with number four on my list: assuming words are words. Here’s what I mean by that.

For more advanced speakers, imagine, if you will, your innocent self back in Chinese 101. In your first week–no wait, your second week (your first week was probably spent on pronunciation drills)–you learn some words. You might learn things like 学生(xuésheng) ‘student’ and 老师(lǎoshī) ‘teacher’ and 朋友(péngyou) ‘friend’. You are excited: “I know three words in Chinese! I am awesome!” You go on your merry way and learn more words. You come across 钢笔(gāngbǐ) ‘pen’, 铅笔(qiānbǐ) ‘pencil’, and 毛笔(máobǐ) ‘writing brush’. You think to yourself–or maybe your teacher even points out to you–”These words all have a 笔(bǐ). They are all writing implements. They must be compounds! I can recognize a compound word! I am awesome!”

Then you learn a few more words, say 先生(xiānshēng) ‘Mr.’, 医生(yīshēng) ‘doctor’, and 老(lǎo) ‘old’. If you are an extra clever student, you begin to be suspicious. Are 学生(xuésheng)，医生(yīshēng)，and 先生(xiānshēng) compounds, just like the 笔(bǐ) words were? I know 老(lǎo), and I know 老师(lǎoshī), so  what does 师(shī) mean? This is why you have learned characters. Without them, you might never have these suspicions–you would just wonder why all Chinese words sound alike. But you have learned characters, and you know how to use a dictionary. You think to yourself, “I will look up all the individual characters! I will learn their meanings! Everything is a compound word! My dictionary will reveal their secrets! I am awesome!” And so you look up 朋(péng) and 友(yǒu). You find they both mean ‘friend’. You think to yourself, “What a waste of effort. Why say ‘friend-friend’? Surely just ‘friend’ is good enough.” So you try a sentence: 她是我的朋。(tā shì wǒde péng) ‘She is my 朋.’  And the result is … actually I’ve never tried. I’m guessing befuddlement. You are humbled. Chastened, even. You think, “My textbook must actually know what it’s talking about. I will abide by its pronouncements.”

You continue your studies with fewer exclamation points. You start to learn verbs. You learn how to say sing: 唱歌(chànggē) and dance: 跳舞(tiàowǔ). You discover that you can’t just say drive or read, you have to say drive a car: 开车(kāichē) or read a book: 看书(kànshū). Your neighbor falls asleep in class one day and you learn the word for sleep: 睡觉(shuìjiào). You memorize them all. And then you learn … you were wrong again. If you dance quickly, you don’t 跳舞得很快(tiàowǔ de hěn kuài). You 跳舞跳得很快(tiàowǔ tiào de hěn kuài)。If you drive a car for three hours, you don’t 开车三个小时(kāichē sān gè xiǎoshí)。 You 开三个小时的车(kāi sān gè xiǎoshí de chē)。That 跳(tiào) that you thought was part of a compound, that 开(kāi) that you couldn’t say by itself, there they are–not quite alone, but not in a compound, either. Then you hear a sentence like 她又唱又跳(tā yòu chàng yòu tiào) ‘She sings and dances’–not a hint of a compound, nor an object for that matter, in sight. Even 睡觉(shuìjiào) ‘sleep’, it turns out, isn’t exactly a word. If you sleep for a long time, you don’t 睡觉很长时间(shuìjiào hěn cháng shíjiān)。You 睡很长时间(shuì hěn cháng shíjiān), and if you feel like it, you tack on a 的觉(de jiào)–this despite the fact that you were the annoying student who asked “Can I say 觉(jiào) all by itself?”, and they told you, they told you, that you couldn’t do it.

But the more you learn, the more you realize that words in general seem to be a little more fluid in Chinese than they are in English. Chinese people really are very fond of two syllable words, so if a word is only one syllable long, well, you tack something else on the end (most often a 子/zi). If your compound words are getting out of control, on the other hand, into impossibly long four syllable territory, just cut some syllables out. 超级市场(chāojí shìchǎng) ‘supermarket’ is far too long–超市(chāoshì) will do just fine. Getting your hot chocolate fix at Starbucks? Forget about 热巧克力(rè qiǎokèlì) (even if that is what the menu says). Just get yourself a 热巧(rèqiǎo)。And sometimes you can even get rid of a syllable from a two syllable word–可以(kěyǐ) ‘can’ can turn into plain old 可(kě), though I’m guessing only under certain circumstances.

Hmmm … I was supposed to also help people avoid these pitfalls. For this one, I think that at the beginning level, awareness is probably good enough. Expect the unexpected. Don’t let your defenses down. Learn your characters so you have some help in tracking these bits and pieces of words. That sort of thing.