'Chinese patterns and structures we love to hate'

[Baron]

There's a blog post on a fairly well-known Chinese learning video site entitled 'Chinese patterns and structures we love to hate', which claims that Chinese grammar is 'actually quite hard', and goes on to give tips about various words and structures. It appears to be pitched at intermediate level learners.

 

These are the items it talks about. Genuinely curious, which of these did/do you struggle with? Or were/are there other things that you "love to hate" (whatever that means) more?

 

1. 的 (de) vs. 得 (de) vs. 地(de)

2. 吗 (ma) vs. 吧 (ba) vs. 呢 (ne)

3. 会 (huì) vs. 能 (néng)

4. 想 (xiǎng) vs. 觉得 (juéde)

5. 了 (le)

[tysond]

1. 的/得/德 a bit mind bending to learn by definition, but is super useful in reading, once I realized it's how you can quickly decode where the verbs and nouns are, it made a lot of sense.  When speaking I think I sometimes throw in one when it's not needed occasionally. 

2. 吗/吧/呢 took a while to remember to add 吗 at the right time, but the concept is simple enough.  So is 吧 and it's fun to use.  呢 is the hardest to use effectively because there are actually quite a few different uses, some simple, some a bit more esoteric

3. 会/能 again... not so hard just takes a while to untrain word-to-word translation.  this isn't really grammar (会 indicating future is, not 会/能）

4. 想/觉得 same... just hard to train yourself to automatically use 想 well 

5. 了 so many uses, this does take some time to get used to.  I feel like I'm only just starting to get it right.

 

Some of the above is not really grammar - I don't consider word definition mismatch to be grammar.

What I find hard:

- 了/没有/不 is what i find hard to get right consistently when speaking, when discussing whether something has or hasn't happened.  

- Measure words are grammar that is quite painful, there's a lot of them to learn and a few rules about how they are used

- Verbs... they separate, repeat, have have objects... verbs are kind of tricky, so many combinations and cases

 

Anyway, I've found learning the basic idea of the grammar "rule" and then learning some example sentences is quite useful to quickly get past any difficulties.

[anonymoose]

了 is the only difficult one.

[li3wei1]

了 is the only difficult one.

 

了 is actually several, and they're all difficult.

 

There's also 还是/或者

[Xiao Kui]

all listed above have been fairly easy for me except 了. I think foreigners also struggle with 把 as an object marker? and using 被，受, 给， and 叫to indicate the passive form of a verb . In my experience many foreigners who are otherwise pretty fluent don't use those constructions - they always say things like 给我那本书。instead of 把那本书给我. （Maybe the former is also right, but it seems to me that Chinese would usually say the latter. I've been back in the US for 3+ years now and my Chinese is a bit rusty, so feel free to GENTLY correct me

[Yorin]

I'll join in with the others who say that amongst these grammar points, 了 is the only one that was really difficult to grasp.

[lakers4sho]

For me, (along with 了 of course) it's got to be the directional complements. I'm just beginning to grasp when and how to use them, but my job's far from done.

[Demonic_Duck]

Why is 会/能 not grammar?

[tysond]

Looked up wikipedia and discovered a tongue-in-cheek definition "As Jeremy Butterfield puts it, "Grammar is often a generic way of referring to any aspect of English that people object to.""

 

I guess 会/能 are both auxiliary verbs, so they have a grammatical function, so I am wrong to say it's not a piece of grammar to learn - it's just that it is so similar to English usage that the only hard part is that there are different meanings corresponding to one English word - so it feels a bit like distinguishing between "can" and "may".  If you hear it or see it it's easy to understand, but sometimes you might produce the wrong one.

 

Compared with 把,  被, which reorder sentences, and for some time are tricky to understand let alone produce, and were once headache causing it's just not a huge issue.  

 

So I guess I subscribe to the definition of grammar as "anything I find objectionable".  Sorry for my lack of precision :-)   

[Ruben von Zwack]

The different de's are super easy, and like tysond said they make reading easier.

The big mystery really is 了。 And negating the past.

 

My personal current pet peeve is 不可能 vs 不可以。 In the anime that I am currently watching, the villains yell both when they suffer a defeat.

[ouyangjun]

The one thing that still gives me problems is Chinese numbers.  If I'm reading, no problem, but when speaking about numbers, if the number exceeds 10 Million I have a tendency to get confused and add or remove a zero....  I'll get there eventually.

[TheBigZaboon]

This seems like as good a place as any to jump into the fray. I want to suggest a book that seems to fit all of the previous posts perfectly in terms of what it contains and how it addresses the problems with some of the grammatical issues expressed by previous posters.

It is a Resource Book/Workbook pair called "Chinese Unmasked," and it is written by Jing-heng Ma (1994 Cheng & Tsui- ISBN: -Traditional Character Edition 0-88727-190-1, Simplified character Edition 0-88727-198-7)

The Resource Book contains 14 modules as follows:

Numbers (16 pages)
Measures (19 pages)
Locality (14 pages)
Time (12 pages)
The markers Le and Guo (13 pages)
Zhe, Zai, and Ne (22 pages)
Adverbs (11 pages)
Auxiliary Verbs (9 pages)
Coverbs (5 pages)
Forms and Patterns for Comparison (13 pages)
Ba Constructions (24 pages)
The Bei Construction and Related Jiao, Rang, Gei Constructions (8 pages)
Shi..De Constructions (8 pages)
Resultative Verbs (27 pages)

This book is not a complete grammar book-style overview like the Rimmington or Ross grammar books, it focuses on the specific issues listed above, and gives a pretty detailed explanation with well-thought-out illustrative sentences. It is too detailed for the absolute beginner, but is perfect for the person moving from a beginner to an intermediate level, or the more advanced student who wants all the background on a particular construction and its pitfalls as a review or reference. I don't have a way of giving adequate examples, but the sections on Ba constructions, Le and Guo, Bei, Jiao, Rang, Gei, and that on Resultative Verbs are especially complete and worth the price of the book by themselves.

I must confess I am a fan of books published by Cheng & Tsui, and I will recommend a number of them in the coming months. (They are the developers and publishers of Integrated Chinese, which I have not used and have never even seen. But a fair number of you have probably used this series in your college and university courses.) I have no connection to the company, other than that both of us come from Boston, and I used to buy stuff in their retail store when they had one.

I will add this information to a number of other threads on grammar resources in the coming weeks, if I can.

[mandarina]

For me, by far the most difficult thing to master (ha, sort of learn), was learning resultative/directional complements, e.g.:

考得上，说不出来，拿得起，看不起 等等

[mouse]

 

My personal current pet peeve is 不可能 vs 不可以。 In the anime that I am currently watching, the villains yell both when they suffer a defeat.

 

I'm going through a phase of obnoxiously overusing 不可能. I can't help myself. However - and I'm sure you've considered this already - if anime dialogue is giving you trouble, it may just be because it's translated. After all, how many times have you heard anyone say 可恶 outside of stuff translated from Japanese?

[Demonic_Duck]

I'm going through a phase of obnoxiously overusing 不可能. I can't help myself. However - and I'm sure you've considered this already - if anime dialogue is giving you trouble, it may just be because it's translated. After all, how many times have you heard anyone say 可恶 outside of stuff translated from Japanese?

 

That's a fair point, though personally I think it may be more of a genre thing than a language thing. I mean, how often do you hear the phrase "you'll pay for this!" outside of films/TV shows etc. with clear-cut villainous characters who are prone to saying such lines?

[lingo-ling]

除了...之外, ...

不但 ... 也...

 

Not because they're hard (they're pretty easy), but because they're so annoyingly (and all too often, needlessly) overused by Chinese writers that it makes me want to wring necks.

[Ruben von Zwack]

 

I'm going through a phase of obnoxiously overusing 不可能

  do you have an example for me of when you'd typically say it?

The series I'm watching is 星游记 so it's not translated.

 

But Demonic Duck has got a point there about the genre thing, maybe I won't find myself too often in situations where I need to yell either  不可能 or 不可以