One of my colleagues, a native Chinese speaker, asked me whether I was still learning Mandarin Chinese. I told him that I had given up. He was baffled by this.<\/p>\n
“But Chinese is such a simple language. It has no grammar<\/a>!”<\/p>\n Now of course, Mandarin has a grammar, because every language has a grammar.<\/p>\n This is one of the curses of being a native speaker of a language: You don’t even realize how hard your language is. As far as you’re concerned, your native language is as easy as falling off a log.\u00b9<\/p>\n Now, it’s true that Mandarin has almost no inflections, unlike most European languages. But that’s not the same as saying it has no grammar<\/i>. It’s just that the grammar moves from being internal (inflection) to external (helping words and word order).<\/p>\n Sidebar<\/b>: David from Popehat lays out some of the simplifications<\/a>, but I think he oversimplifies the use of the completion marker \u4e86. It’s not strictly speaking a past-tense marker, at least not in the sense we consider it in English. Proper use of \u4e86 is more complicated, and this page tries to explain some of the subtleties<\/a>. David later tries to explain Mandarin phonology<\/a>. I must admit that I have an advantage in already having a tonal language wired into my brain, so I don’t have the hurdle of learning to hear and speak tones. I just have to learn to hear and speak different<\/i> tones. Which is still frustrating. End sidebar<\/b><\/p>\n One of the consequences of “your own native language is simple” is that native speakers are sometimes the worst choices for explaining their own language, since they simply fail to recognize how weird their language is. An example I gave some time ago was that elusive third tone. If you ask a native speaker how it is pronounced, they will say one thing (“dipping tone”), but then when they themselves speak the third tone they do something completely different<\/a> (“low level tone”). Native speakers are so convinced that the third tone dips that when you call them on it, they insist that the tone dipped, when in fact it barely moved at all.<\/p>\n That conversation with my father went something like this.<\/p>\n Me: “In that sentence, you said \u2329low level tone\u232a.”<\/p>\n My father: “No, I didn’t. I said \u2329dipping tone\u232a.”<\/p>\n Me: “Well, sure, that time you said \u2329dipping tone\u232a. But in the original sentence, you said \u2329low level tone\u232a.”<\/p>\n My father: “No, I didn’t. Listen again. \u2329repeats sentence and uses low level tone\u232a.”<\/p>\n Me: “There, see? You used \u2329low level tone\u232a.”<\/p>\n My father: “No, I didn’t. Here, you repeat back to me what you think I said.”<\/p>\n Me: “\u2329says sentence with low level tone\u232a.”<\/p>\n My father: “There, you got it!”<\/p>\n Me: “But I used the wrong tone! I should have said, \u2329says sentence with dipping tone\u232a.”<\/p>\n My father: “No, that’s wrong. You exaggerated the tone too much.”<\/p>\n That last remark from my father was what made it click for me: The low level tone and the dipping tone are complementary allophones<\/i>. (My father, of course, has no idea what a complementary allophone is, but that’s okay.)<\/p>\n Another example of native speakers not seeing the complexity in their own language is the use of the negative adverb \u6ca1. Mandarin has two main adverbs that mean “not”: \u4e0d and \u6ca1. If you ask a native speaker, they will tell you, “It’s very simple. \u4e0d is the general-purpose negation, and \u6ca1 is used only to negate the verb to have<\/i>. In other words, \u6ca1 is always followed by \u6709.” But then you will see that native speakers use \u6ca1 to negate all sorts of things that aren’t \u6709. If you point this out, they will retcon it by saying that the phrase \u6ca1\u95dc\u4fc2 (“no connection”, which is an idiom that means “it doesn’t matter, don’t worry about it”) is really a shorthand for \u6ca1\u6709\u95dc\u4fc2 (“doesn’t have a connection”). Native speakers play this card whenever an out-of-place \u6ca1 shows up. “Oh, it’s negating an invisible \u6709.” If you ask them how to tell when there is an invisible \u6709 in a sentence, they will say “You just have to know,” or sometimes the circular “Stick a \u6ca1 in front and see if it makes sense.”<\/p>\n Sidebar<\/b>: Here’s a page that tries to explain the difference between \u4e0d and \u6ca1<\/a>. The way I internalize it based on limited observation is to say that \u4e0d is not tied to a moment in time (innate or habitual property), whereas \u6ca1 refers to a particular incident (momentary property).<\/p>\n