Learning Mandarin with Greg

I learned Japanese for many years in my teens. And I certainly remember that the most common way to make a sentence into a question, or to recognize a question, was that it ends in “ka”. Mandarin has a similar word in

吗 (ma)

It’s often translated as a question mark. If you look carefully, you can see that the character has two characters (or radicals) within it. On the left is 口 (Kǒu) which means “mouth”. That provides part of the meaning. On the right is 马 (Mǎ) which means “horse”. It’s used to provide the sound, not the meaning.

2021-02-12

In my first word order post, I explained the basic Subject-Verb-Object sentence order. Then in a second post, I explained how time (when something happened) normally gets added to sentences. In the third post, I looked at adding where something happened. In this final post in this word order series, I’ll look at how an action happened.

How an action happened

In English, we can do this a few ways:

2021-01-29

In my first word order post, I explained the basic Subject-Verb-Object sentence order. Then in a second post, I explained how time (when something happened) normally gets added to sentences. In this post, I’ll look at how you show where something happened.

Where an action happened

In English, we can do this a few ways:

1 - This morning I drank coffee in the office.

2 - In the office, I drank coffee this morning.

2021-01-22

In my previous Mandarin post, I explained the basic Subject-Verb-Object sentence order. That’s pretty similar to English. One stark difference though, is when you start to add in the time that an action happened.

When an action happened

In English, we can do this many ways:

1 - This morning I drank coffee.

2 - I, this morning, drank coffee.

3 - I drank coffee this morning.

I’d say that #3 is probably the most common, and the “cleanest”. #1 is ok-ish, and #2 works but is pretty odd. It could be used to emphasise when it happened.

2021-01-15

Many people think learning Chinese is difficult. They’re probably right. Many parts of Chinese, though, are quite straightforward for English speakers. Tense is simpler (and I’ll write about it again soon), and sentence structure isn’t too bad. Let me tell you about some core differences though.

Subject-Verb-Object

This one’s the easiest. It’s the same as in English. I can say:

我喜欢咖啡。(Wǒ xǐhuān kāfēi.)

It’s just: I like coffee. 我 (Wǒ) is “I”.喜欢 (xǐhuān) is “like”.咖啡 (kāfēi) is a loan word for “Coffee”.

2021-01-08

If you spend any time talking to native Chinese, one thing that you’ll find starkly different to Western discussions is how direct they can be in terms of talking about body shape (and many other personal items). In the West, we tend to be pretty coy about discussing someone’s body shape with them, but I find my Chinese speaking friends are much more direct. So I thought it would be good to start by describing some of the common words for body shapes.

2021-01-01

In Chinese, you don’t just directly translate sentences like: “I am well” or “I am good”.

Adjectives like “good” always have adverbs attached to them to indicate the degree of intensity. There are several of these in use. Here are a few common ones:

我很好。(Wǒ hěn hǎo.) is literally “I very good”. I’m sure you’ve heard non-native English speakers from Asia use that sentence construction. Google Translate says “I am very good” but the “very” in this case is softer than it is in English.

2020-05-29

In English, most of us know the common names for parts of speech, like nouns, verbs, etc. But what are the equivalents in Mandarin?

名词 (Míngcí) is a Noun.

词 (Cí) means Word and 名 (Míng) relates to a name. That makes sense as a noun is a naming word.

词典 (Cídiǎn) is a dictionary.

动词 (Dòngcí) is a Verb. 动 (Dòng) relates to moving, so a verb is like an action word.

2020-05-22

Before I started learning other languages, I’d always heard people saying that translating was hard, but I didn’t really understand what they meant. When I was about 13, I was introduced to French, Latin, and Japanese. Now that’s an odd mixture. I started to see the problems. Directly translating a sentence word by word leads to either nonsense in the other language or clumsy language.

For Chinese, I wanted to cover a simple example today.

2020-05-15

I wrote my last two Mandarin blog posts about the Qixi festival and the legend of the Cowherd and Weaver Girl. I wanted to round out that discussion today.

In the West, we have a few tales like Santa Clause, and the Easter Bunny that seem pervasive. St Valentine isn’t such a big deal, even though Valentine’s Day is named after him.

People who haven’t studied China much usually don’t understand just how embedded these tales are within society, and also in the language. I see old tales appearing as idioms that end up meaning something quite different to what they say.

2020-05-08