2.9 This, That, and the Describing Particle — Epoché
What you will be able to do Say "this book" and "that book" with the counting word that Mandarin requires between the demonstrative and the noun. Put a demonstrative, a number and a counting word in front of the same noun, in the right order. Use 的 to say whose something is, and to hang a description in front of a noun. Leave 的 out in the places where a speaker leaves it out, and say why those places are what they are. Prerequisites : 2.8, which gave you the counting words. Half of this lesson is impossible without them, because a demonstrative in Mandarin needs one just as a number does: 2.8 Grammar . This lesson finishes the noun phrase. With the numbers of lesson 2.7, the counting words of 2.8 and the two devices here, you can build any noun phrase the first phase needs: this book, those two books, my book, the new book, whose book. The two devices are a pair of demonstratives and one very small word that does more work than any other syllable in the language. That small word, 的 , is one of the most frequent characters in written Chinese (in this course's corpus it comes second only to 我 ; see lesson 1.9), and its main job can be stated in one line: everything before it describes the thing after it. English splits that job between an apostrophe, a possessive pronoun, a preposition and a relative clause. Mandarin uses one syllable in one position, which is simpler to state and harder to believe. The pattern The two demonstratives are 这 zhè, "this", for what is near, and 那 nà, "that", for what is not. In careful speech neither stands directly in front of a noun. Between them and the noun goes a counting word, chosen for the noun exactly as it would be after a number. So "this book" is this, the counting word for bound things, book, and "that cat" is that, the counting word for animals, cat. The corpus shows the shape in four sentences. 看这本书。 [1] is "read this book"; 这本书是新的。 [2] is "this book is new"; 这本书很小。 [3] is "this book is small"; and 那本书在哪儿？ [4] is "where is that book". Four sentences, one shape, and the counting word present in every one. When a number joins the phrase, it goes between the demonstrative and the counting word, so the full order is demonstrative, number, counting word, noun: this, two, bound-thing, book is "these two books". That order is fixed and it never varies. It is also, read from the outside in, the order English uses for the same elements, which is a small piece of luck: "these two books" has the same four-part structure with the counting word deleted. One note on pronunciation. Both demonstratives have a second reading in northern speech, and the dictionary records zhèi beside zhè for the near one. You will hear both. Use the reading given here and recognise the other. This one and that one When the noun is obvious and you want to say just "this one", the demonstrative takes the general counting word and stops there. 我要这个。 [5] is "I want this one". This is the two-syllable string you will use most often in a shop, and it follows the rule of the previous lesson exactly: the noun goes, the counting word stays. For the plural, the counting word slot is filled by the word for "some" that ended the last lesson. 这些书是谁的？ [6] is "whose books are these", built as this-some-book-is-whose. There is no plural ending anywhere in that sentence, and the plurality is carried entirely by the one syllable in the counting word slot. Learn the two plural demonstratives as fixed pairs, because they are needed constantly and because building them from parts every time is slow. Saying whose To say whose something is, put the owner first, then 的 , then the thing. 这是我的车。 [7] is "this is my car": I, the particle, car. The pronoun does not change shape, so there is no separate word corresponding to English my as distinct from me . There is the pronoun, and there is the particle, and the particle does what the apostrophe and the possessive pronouns do in English. Because the owner slot takes any noun phrase, it also takes a question word. 这是谁的车？ [8] is "whose car is this", built as this-is-who-particle-car. English has a separate word for that, whose ; Mandarin uses the ordinary word for "who" in the ordinary owner slot. This is the substitution rule of lesson 2.6 doing its work again, and it is worth pausing on: once you know the pattern, "whose" costs you nothing new. Another pronoun in the same slot gives 我喜欢你的车。 [9] , "I like your car". The particle can also end the phrase, with no noun after it. 这是我的。 [10] is "this is mine", and 不是我的。 [11] is "it is not mine". English switches from my to mine to do this, so it has two words where Mandarin has one construction with the end left off. Compare a full phrase with the same owner: 那是我的猫。 [12] , "that is my cat". Describing with the particle The same particle hangs a description in front of a noun. Put the description first, then the particle, then the noun, and the result is a noun phrase. A one-syllable adjective, though, usually skips the particle and goes straight in front of the noun, so 新书 is "a new book". With the particle, new-particle-book is still "a new book" but picks it out as against others, "the new one". 这是新的。 [13] is "this is new", with the noun left off as in the possessive examples, and 这是一条很大的狗。 [14] is "this is a big dog", literally this-is-one-long-thing very-big-particle-dog: with 很 in front, the description is two syllables and takes the particle. The description can be as long as you like, and its position does not change. Where English would switch to a relative clause after the noun, Mandarin keeps piling the description up in front and puts the particle at the end of it. The book I read yesterday comes out as I-yesterday-read-particle-book, with the whole clause standing where the single word "new" stood. That construction is the subject of a lesson in a later phase, but it is worth seeing now, because it shows that the order is the same at every size: describer, particle, described. One consequence to notice