The Most Important Part of Chinese Grammar

Very helpful tips, thank you

Vietnamese L2 speaker, Chinese learner here! This is really interesting to me. I feel like the Chinese use of topic prominence more closely resembles that of Vietnamese than it does Japanese or Korean. That the structure there is undeniable, but I don't think it's accurate to say that they always use it, at least not in the sense it's used in Japanese or Korean, in which the verb going at the end is (IIRC) mandatory.

Like I could be wrong, but in Chinese "我没有问题“ seems more natural than “问题我没有", the latter seeming a little bit odd?

Vietnamese, at least, seems like a language where both topic-comment and SVO structures are valid, depending on context. Chinese might be similar. But I feel like a lot of the conventional grammatical treatments of Vietnamese on this issue don't seem to fully explain how the language is used. "Điều này tôi từ chối hiểu" seems completely natural, but "Phở tôi đi ăn“ is obviously less correct than "tôi đi ăn phở", the former reading more clearly as "The phở that I am going to eat...", with a pragmatically inferred 'mà' particle inserted. Here the syntactical differences between Chinese and Vietnamese make drawing parallels harder.

Still, thank you for this!

It sounds like how in English we use "Regarding x,..." to start a sentence

Great video. Thanks

I like the video but it'd be nice if you explained and translated the chinese phrases a bit more, maybe with a translation on the bottom and matching boxes or some colored highlighting to show word order in the text, or some basic subtitles when you/someone is speaking. It seems like I'm not necessarily your target audience since I don't learn chinese specifically, but I like linguistics and learning about various other languages' structures. I think it'd help open your videos up to some more people (assuming your other videos the same) and allow more people to engage with them.

Topic-Comment structure was in my textbooks thirty years ago, how did it disappear from instruction?

Hah, Vietnamese also has this exact grammar rule and it's used widely as well

宾语前置？不管是文言还是白话确实很自然而然就用了

I bet 99% audience of this channel is native speakers.

So basically , Chinese grammar is becoming more like how Japanese has always been in a way?

2:13 The last sentence sounds weird "don't you hate your own words?" What does that suppose to mean?

edit: I went to the comment and seem like you made a mistake

As a native Chinese speaker I just wondered how you find these tv show while I find hard to find something native English tv show to learn speaking English 😂

2:14 should be 你也不嫌腻得慌 Don't you find it too greasy

I have considered picking up some Chinese to be more competitive in the workforce. This is helpful.

In English, you bring the attention to certain phrase by beginning the topic with "in terms of", "regarding", "about" isn't it the case?

Bro awesome channel! I’m HSK5 level vocab wise but suck at comprehension. Love Classical Chinese and would love to read Dream of the Red Chamber some day

It’s 腻得慌 不是你的话

Topic comment sentences aren't a thing in English? I use sentences the likes of which you gave as an example, I'm certain. It's why I abuse semi colons when I write

Spoken French uses topic-comment structure a lot. In Louisiana, a lot of old people use it in English. The sentence "Christmas presents, I bought them a long time ago" actually sounds like something my grandma would say

What's that TV show? Shang quan ai qing? Where to watch it?

2:54 If you tweak that sentence just a little to "Eating at the cafeteria, every day—doesn't that make you feel tired?" then it does sound like natural English conversation. OTOH I'm sure that kind of structure is indeed used much more frequently in some other languages, like Chinese.

看外國人討論自己的母語真的好有趣😄

Interesting I was watching some shows in Mandarin and my vocabulary was finally good enough to notice they were doing this which was my first time noticing.

Indonesian works like this too, e.g

Semua orang tahu lagu itu lah.
All people know that song, duh.

vs. more naturally,

Lagu itu semua orang tahu lah.
That song, all people know, duh.

So you’re telling me Yoda speaks colloquial Chinese?

Morden Chinese is quite different from the language as old as Dream of Red Chamber.

中文口语是需要情景理解的，没必要分析语法，一般非学术用语你颠倒了语序也是可以读得通的。
Spoken Chinese requires situational understanding, and there is no need to analyze grammar&syntax. Generally, non-academic terms can be read if you reverse the word order.
口语中文需要是理解的情景，语法分析没必要，非学术一般用语你颠了倒语序可以也是得读的通。
The most difficult part of Chinese is the literary 文言文 heritage and modern scientific vocabulary, not everyday words. You can live on machine translation.

good teacher, you are! the force in you, it surely runs!

Just want to restate for people in the comments, this comes up alot in spoken Chinese or "WeChat" conversation, honestly if you have a language partner you will notice !

2:13 actually she said “天天吃食堂，你也不嫌腻得慌” “Eat at the cafeteria everyday, don’t you feel you had enough ?” 腻 is the feeling where you got overwhelmed and nauseated by eating too much oily or sweet food. As a slang, it means you are getting tired of something because you had enough. Bad feeling + 得慌, this structure is to emphasize that the bad feeling is strong.

As a native speaker, I would say that there ain't much grammar rules besides the standard mandarin one, and standard mandarin is an artificial language forged just a century ago. As long as the sentences are semantically correct (it makes sense), there are always some grammar rules that dates back to ancient Chinese and makes your sentences correct.

You seem to want to be a linguist, especially of Chinese or other Asian languages. Glad you have the passion and desire to share how you learn and master Asian languages as an American-born speaker. Way to go!

Why not put simplified next to traditional 😢

Interesting. I know Japanese so I've never had any problems dealing with this (in terms of input) in my experience with Chinese, but it's useful to have it said so explicitly, thank you for the video.

ive learnt to love language learning! thanks for a great video

2:11 the transcript is wrong。正确的应该是：吃什么食堂？天天吃食堂，你也不嫌腻得慌？

Very useful observation. As a long-time learner, I've become used to this structure, without fully realizing it even existed. But for many years, it was hard to get a handle on natural-feel sentence structure. Textbook examples tend to focus on formal 把 structure

Thanks for pointing this out! I've been living in China for a few years now, and I think I've been noticing this pattern, but kept distrusting myself because so few teaching materials actually talk about this. It's just something I tend to see people write in texts, and if I'm listening well enough I notice it too. But so many teachers are like "of course it's subject verb object" .... not really! In messages to some Chinese friends, I go out on a limb and start using it to see if native speakers notice, and get no comments on it. But I never know if this means they really understand it or are just too afraid to correct me. I have a tutor, and she says that this is actually pretty common, but most of our basic language books still use SVO in examples. One person told me it's more of a regional thing, that people in some parts of China use this pattern more than others. Although it seems common enough in the southern Jiangsu area.

There is a mistake in this video, in the first quoted scene from TV drama, the sentence spoke by the actor is actually: 天天吃食堂，你也不嫌腻得慌。not 你也不嫌你的话。the later is ill formed and doesn't quite make sense to me (a native speaker). the correct meaning of this sentence is: eating the cafeteria everyday, you still dont feel tired (of their same old dishes)?

This, and a number of other quirks of the spoken language which just get completely ignored/ glossed over by teachers and textbooks is why the 'just do comprehensible input' suggestion is so annoying. Really, it can be so frustrating when you hear a bunch of words you recognise, but you're questioning whether you missed a sentence break because the order just doesn't make sense according to what you've been told. Another big big issue is elision, the extent to which it is present in normal chinese conversation is so massively downplayed or weirdly outright denied by mandarin teachers and it never comes up in any learning materials I've encountered.

Effective listening requires knowing what to listen for

I think you heard wrong in the dialog 2:06 , it sounds rather like says "嫌腻‘’ which means eating something too many times and feeling tired of it.


Edit: just saw the other comment pointing out the same thing.

English uses topic-comment a lot too.

The main difference is that the English comment will usually include pronouns that refer back to the topic, whereas in Chinese, these are inferred, which means that you, as the listener, have to supply them.

This skirt – my sister bought it yesterday.

See this skirt? My sister bought it yesterday.

About this skirt, my sister bought it yesterday.

Here, "it" is mandatory in the English comment, whereas topic-comment languages like Chinese can omit it.

As an aside, English can also emphasise the topic by turning it into a relative clause:

This is the skirt my sister bought.

1:52 "2016" 😀 "10 years ago" 💀

That’s the reason we Chinese abuse the “It is… that ..” structure so often when writing English essays. 😂

You used your face to mark the topic of the sentence in English
6:14 inflection
6:19 that skirt
6:28 including in classical chinese
etc

as a japanese speaker I noticed this and was fortunate to quickly able to adapt