User Comments - auntie68
auntie68
Posted on: Buying a Newspaper
March 7, 2008 at 3:11 AMHi calkins. The Stunt Toddler is in his nanny's hands now, so I have a few minutes. The difficulties with 的 stem from the fact that English uses subordination (-> subordinate clauses), whereas Chinese uses "adjectival phrases" instead. Here is an example of subordination, English-style: "I don't like that friend of yours WHO gets mean when he is drunk." The sense of the Chinese version, which is conveyed by an adjectival phrase, would be: "I don't like your gets-mean-when-he's-drunk friend." The adjectival phrase gets-mean-when-he's-drunk is marked by the 的, as in gets-mean-when-he's-drunk-的朋友. But seriously, your question can really only be answered by CPOD. So far they have been firm about being "grammar-lite", but since such questions about 的 seem to be popping up constantly, they may have to rethink their policy!
Posted on: Buying a Newspaper
March 7, 2008 at 1:44 AMI agree with memmifer. Okay, Stunt Toddler will be expecting me soon... on Wednesday, his "bilingual" pre-school gave us a folder of his "work" for the first two months of pre-school. Awesome. He suddenly started spouting Mandarin as he was taking us through his stuff. And the biggest surprise of all was that he was totally comfortable with the lessons on the names for Chinese "strokes" eg. dian3, heng2, shu4, na4 etc. Pronunciation is not bad at all for a 2.5-year-old who has NO Chinese whatsoever in his day apart from maybe a few minutes of Cantonese here and there.
Posted on: Buying a Newspaper
March 7, 2008 at 12:56 AMIf you're really feeling masochistic, your sentence can also be expressed as a triple-的 sentence with a slightly different meaning: 你要的书，是中文的(书)还是英文的(书)？ "The books that you're after, would that be Chinese books or English books?"
Posted on: Buying a Newspaper
March 7, 2008 at 12:50 AMHi calkins. May I try? First, I believe you are right about 看不懂 and 听不懂. I guess you also know the affirmative forms: 看得懂 (kan4dedong3) and 听得懂 (ting1dedong3). Eg. "你听得懂吗？ (ni3 ting1dedong3 ma?). About the 的 (de): I don't have enough time to hanyu-pinyin-ize my answer fully this morning, so I hope that newbies/ele's will be forgiving. 你要什么书？ 中文的还是英文的？ is actually a single sentence that has been split up to make it easier to understand: 你要中文的还是英文的书？ In this more complex mono-sentence, you need the 的 (de) to mark each "adjectival phrase". Hope that wasn't way, way, too opaque. I probably shouldn't be posting when I am running late and have a date with Stunt Toddler very soon! Take a look at the following sentence and see if the 的 makes any sense to you (the 的 within parentheses can be omitted, I think, but I just wanted you to see): 这里有中文(的)书， 英文的也有 Finally, I'm not a native speaker, so if I've made some horrible Mandarin error (esp. word order), I really hope that Amber will wade in with a correction.
Posted on: My Scooter Won't Start
March 6, 2008 at 2:10 PMPhew! So I don't need to take out my nunchakus and "challenge" you to a fight. Sleep well, and take care...
Posted on: My Scooter Won't Start
March 6, 2008 at 1:34 PMnicolas, are you drunk?
Posted on: My Scooter Won't Start
March 6, 2008 at 10:30 AMSomebody call an Amber-lance, please!
Posted on: Chinese Green Eggs and Ham
March 6, 2008 at 2:35 AMAh. Okay. earlybird asked a question about 高兴 vs 愉快 here, and the answer from CPOD was "no difference". I suspect that there is a difference, which is why I offered up the "usage note" from my dictionary which seemed to confirm that the answer is not so simple, and so my question to the CPOD team was, "Are you really sure?" Sorry, nicolas, this a perfect example of why this Auntie should be banned from posting in the newbie/ele levels!
Posted on: Chinese Green Eggs and Ham
March 6, 2008 at 2:22 AMSorry nicolas, don't understand your question.
Posted on: Buying a Newspaper
March 7, 2008 at 3:29 AMThe sense of memmifer's translation can also be conveyed (literally, sorry!) by: "Which book do you want? [The] that-is-Chinese(-one; implied as you say) or that-is-English(-one)?" The thing about 的 is that it usually implicitly includes a verb -- usually "to be". In Chinese, an "adjectival" phrase is not merely a list of adjectives, it is a whole free-standing phrase (with verbs etc) which has the effect of an adjective.