2.2 A is B — 是 and 不是 — Epoché
What you will be able to do Join two nouns with 是 to say that one is the other, and say the result aloud with the right tone. Negate any such sentence with 不是 , and explain why the first syllable is said bú and not bù . Give your nationality and someone else's, using a country name plus one character. Say why 是 must not be used before an adjective, and recognise the sentence type that takes a different word instead. Prerequisites : 2.1, which set out the order subject, verb, object and the four things Chinese does not make you learn. This lesson keeps that order and changes only what fills the middle slot, so read 2.1 Grammar again if the shape of a plain statement is not yet automatic. The last lesson dealt with sentences that have an action in them. This one deals with the other large family: sentences that assert that one thing is another thing. In English these use the verb be , and so it is natural to look for the Chinese verb be and use it the same way. Chinese does have a verb that fits here, and it is 是 , said shì . The difficulty is not learning it. The difficulty is that English be covers several jobs at once and 是 covers only one of them, so a learner who treats the two as equivalent will produce a wrong sentence within about five minutes. This lesson gives the one job 是 does, gives it thoroughly, and then draws a line around it. The next lesson is about what stands in for be on the other side of that line. The pattern Three slots again, and 是 sits in the middle one. What goes on either side of it is a noun, a pronoun or a noun phrase. The formula is: noun, then 是 , then noun. It asserts that the first is an instance of, or identical with, the second. That is the whole of it, and the sentences below show how little decoration it takes. There are no articles to choose, no endings anywhere, and 是 itself has one form. Read the first column aloud before looking at the second. Chinese English 我是学生。 [1] I am a student. 你是学生。 [2] You are a student. 我们是学生。 [3] We are students. 他们是学生。 [4] They are students. 我是老师。 [5] I am a teacher. 他是老师。 [6] He is a teacher. 他是医生。 [7] He is a doctor. 她是医生。 [8] She is a doctor. 我是中国人。 [9] I am Chinese. 她是日本人。 [10] She is Japanese. 这是书。 [11] This is a book. Rows one and two differ by their first character only, and the last three characters are identical. Compare that with English, where "I am" and "you are" are different words. Rows three and four are the ones to stare at. The table gives them in the present, but the English that came with them in the corpus says "We were students" and "They were students", and nothing in either Chinese sentence says anything about the past. Whoever translated them chose the past, presumably from a context we cannot see; the Chinese allows either. Row one, an identical shape, came out as "am". If you take one thing from this lesson, take this: 是 is not a present-tense form, because there are no tense forms. Row eleven is the article point from the last lesson again. 这是书 is three characters and means "this is a book", "this is the book" or "these are books", and the choice belongs to whoever is translating into English. Nationality is a noun Rows nine and ten are worth a section of their own, because they show a habit of Chinese that saves a great deal of memorising. A nationality is not an adjective. It is the name of the country with the character 人 , rén , "person", stuck on the end. 中国 is China, so 中国人 is a Chinese person; 日本 is Japan, so 日本人 is a Japanese person. The pattern is regular, with no irregular forms to learn. English has nothing this tidy. It makes nationality words from country names in several different ways, and a learner of English has to be told each one: Japan gives Japanese , China gives Chinese , Spain gives Spanish , Poland gives Polish , Denmark gives Danish but also a Dane , and France gives French but a Frenchman . In Chinese every one of these is the country plus 人 . There is a consequence for the pattern of this lesson. Because 中国人 is a noun and not an adjective, it fits the slot after 是 without any trouble. When an English speaker says "I am Chinese" the word after "am" is an adjective, and that is exactly the sort of thing which, as the last section of this lesson shows, cannot follow 是 . The Chinese sentence is safe because the Chinese word is a noun. Getting this right by accident is easy; knowing why it is right will keep you out of trouble later. Saying no To deny one of these sentences, put 不 , bù , in front of 是 . Nothing else moves. There is nothing like the English need to bring in an auxiliary, as when "he comes" becomes "he does not come": the negator simply goes before the verb. Chinese English 我不是学生。 [12] I am not a student. 他不是老师。 [13] He isn't a teacher. 我不是中国人。 [14] I'm not Chinese. 这不是钱。 [15] This isn't money. One thing about the sound. 不 on its own is bù , with a falling tone. 是 also has a falling tone. When two falling tones come together in this pair, the first one rises instead, so 不是 is said bú shì and not bù shì . This is the rule from lesson 0.5, and 不是 is the commonest place you will meet it. Say the four sentences above aloud and listen for the rise; if you say bù shì you will be understood, but you will sound as though you are reading each character separately, which is what you will be doing. Notice also that the negated sentence is not shorter or reorganised. English contracts: "is not" becomes "isn't", "I am not" becomes "I'm not", and the corpus translations above use both forms. 不是 is never contracted, so it is two clear syllables every time. Where this verb must not go Here is the line. In the sentence this lesson teaches, 是 links a noun to a noun. It does not link a noun to a description. (Short replies such as 是我。 "It's me" and 我也是。 "Me too" keep the 是 and leave one of the nouns unsaid, and the emphatic use described below is a separate job.) The English verb be does both jobs with the same three forms, which is why the mistake is so nearly unavoidable fo