2.12 Wanting and Being Able — 想 要 会 能 可以 — Epoché
What you will be able to do Put an auxiliary in front of a verb and say why nothing in the sentence changes shape. Tell the five words apart: two for wanting and three for the different senses of English "can". Say what separates the two negatives, one of which is a statement and the other a command. Use the word for a learned skill in its second job, where English uses "will". Prerequisites : 2.6, the lesson on question words, because one of the practice sentences puts a question word and an auxiliary in the same sentence. You will also want 2.3 Grammar for the plain negative, which is the negative all five words take in this lesson. English speakers arrive at this lesson expecting trouble, because English modal verbs are one of the most irregular corners of the language: can has no infinitive, will has no third-person ending, and their past forms often mean something other than past time. None of that is waiting for you. A Mandarin auxiliary is an ordinary word placed in front of the verb, it never changes shape, and it is negated by putting the plain negative in front of it. The work is entirely in choosing between them, and the reason is worth stating before the detail. English has one word, "can", for three different things, and Mandarin has three. So this is one of the places where the language you are learning makes a distinction that yours does not, and where the effort goes into deciding which sense you meant rather than into learning a form. The pattern Subject, auxiliary, verb. 我想去。 [1] is "I want to go", and there are three words in it: I, want, go. English puts to between the two verbs; Mandarin puts nothing at all, which is the shape you already used in lesson 2.1 for a verb and its object. Nothing changes for person. 我会说中文。 [2] is "I can speak Chinese" and 他会说中文。 [3] is "he can speak Chinese". Compare the two sentences character by character: only the first one differs. English makes no change here either, because can is one of the few verbs that does not take the third-person ending, but the ordinary English verb would: "he speaks". In Mandarin nothing ever does. The same frame holds for the others. 我能帮你。 [4] is "I can help you" and 她可以来。 [5] is "she can come". Four different auxiliaries, one shape. Telling the five apart Read the middle column as the question the word answers. The distinction between the last three is the one to spend time on, because all three come out as "can" in English. Word · pinyin What it says From the corpus 想 xiǎng would like to; feel like. The softer of the two words for wanting 我想去。 [1] I want to go 要 yào want to, intend to, am going to. Firmer, and close to a demand when said to somebody 我要睡觉。 [6] I want to sleep 会 （ 會 ） huì know how to, having learned it. A skill, not a permission and not an opportunity 我会做饭。 [7] I can cook 能 néng am able to in these circumstances: free, near enough, strong enough, allowed by the facts 我能帮忙。 [8] I can help out 可以 kěyǐ may; it is all right for me to. Permission, or acceptability 我可以试试。 [9] I can try The three "can" words divide the ground cleanly once you have a test for each. Ask whether the ability was learned: if it was, the answer is the third word, and it covers cooking, swimming, driving and every language you speak. Ask whether the circumstances allow it: if that is the point, the answer is the fourth, and it is what you use for being free this afternoon or being strong enough to lift something. Ask whether somebody has to allow it: if so, the answer is the fifth. The boundaries do overlap in practice, and a speaker choosing the fourth word where you expected the fifth is not making a mistake. But the third one is genuinely separate: using it for permission or for opportunity is wrong rather than merely unidiomatic, and it is an easy error for an English speaker, because English "I can cook" and "I can come" look identical. Wanting, and the two negatives The two words for wanting differ in force rather than in meaning. The softer one is the safe choice in almost every sentence a beginner says, and it is also the polite one; the firmer one states an intention and, addressed to another person, comes close to telling them what to do. One more thing distinguishes them: in the sense of wanting, only the firmer one takes the thing wanted straight after it, so it is also the ordinary verb for wanting a thing rather than wanting to do something. Their negatives do not match, and this is the sharpest trap in the lesson. 我不想去。 [10] is "I don't want to go", a statement about yourself. But put the plain negative in front of the firmer word, with no subject, and you get 不要动。 [11] which is "don't move" — an order to somebody else. Two negatives that differ by a single syllable, one of them a report and the other a prohibition. If you mean that you would rather not, use the softer word; the firmer one negated is how you tell a child not to touch something. The other negatives are straightforward. 我不会来。 [12] is "I will not come" and 我不能说。 [13] is "I cannot say". In each of them the negative goes in front of the auxiliary, and never at the end. Put between the auxiliary and the verb, it would negate the verb alone and change the meaning, which is a later step. The same word for what is going to happen The word for a learned skill has a second job: it says that something will happen. 他明天会来。 [14] is "he will come tomorrow". There is no separate future tense anywhere in the sentence, and the verb is the same verb you would use for the past; what marks the future is the time word from lesson 2.10, with this auxiliary adding the speaker's confidence that it will indeed happen. That means the auxiliary is not required. A time word such as tomorrow already places the event in the future, so you use this word when you want to predict rather than merely schedule. Do not reach for it every time you would say "will" in English. Asking and answering Questions are made the way lesson 2.5 made them, by adding the question particle a