4.1 Meeting Someone — Epoché
What you will be able to do Greet someone, give your own name, and ask for theirs, using the words of lesson 3.1 and the few new ones in this lesson's table. Choose between the plain and the respectful word for "you" according to who is in front of you, and keep that choice for the whole conversation. Answer the first questions about yourself, your name and whether you are a student, without pausing to translate from English. Close a first meeting politely, with the set phrase for being glad to have met someone. Prerequisites : 3.1, which gave the greetings, the words for name and surname, and the personal pronouns as a list. This lesson puts that list into two conversations, so read 3.1 Vocabulary again before you start. Everything up to here has been material seen one piece at a time: a sound, a character, a pattern, a word list. From this volume on the pieces come back in the only shape that matters outside a book, which is two people talking. Nothing new is asked of your grammar. What is asked is speed, and speed comes from having heard the same ten or twelve sentences often enough that they arrive whole instead of being built. That is why the dialogues below are made of sentences taken from the corpus rather than written for the occasion. They are not elegant and they are not literary. They are sentences people actually wrote, and their plainness is the point: a first conversation in any language is a short list of fixed moves, and you will do better learning the list than inventing around it. One decision has to be made before the first word, though, and English gives you no practice in making it. Choosing Between the Two Words for You Mandarin has two second-person pronouns. The plain one is 你 nǐ and the respectful one is 您 nín. English once had a similar pair, "thou" and "you", and has lost it; in Mandarin the choice is still live, a speaker makes it every time a conversation starts, and getting it wrong is noticed. The choice runs on two things: age difference and role. Someone of your own age, in the same position as you, takes 你 . Someone clearly older, or in a position that the situation marks as above yours, takes 您 . A teacher, a customer, an official, an elderly stranger: 您 . A classmate, a friend, a child: 你 . Two habits make this harder for an English speaker than it needs to be. The first is that English hides the decision inside other words. You signal respect with "sir", with "would you mind", with a longer sentence, and you can be polite in English without ever changing a pronoun. In Mandarin the pronoun itself can carry it: the plain word is the everyday default, and choosing the respectful one says something about the relationship. (Speakers in the south and in Taiwan use the respectful one less.) The second habit is more practical. Because English has one form, learners tend to use 您 for everyone in order to be safe. It is not safe. Used to someone your own age it sounds stiff and can sound sarcastic, the way "certainly, madam" sounds when said to a friend. A third option settles many cases without any pronoun at all. In Mandarin a title can be used as a form of address on its own: to a teacher you may simply say the word for teacher, or the surname with the title, as in 关老师！ from lesson 3.1. It is the most useful single thing in this lesson, because a title rarely gets the register wrong. The second dialogue below takes the other safe road and opens with the respectful greeting. Both dialogues below are the same short event, a first meeting, done twice with different people. Read them in that order and watch only the pronouns. Dialogue A Two young people of the same age, meeting outside a classroom on the first morning of term, so 你 throughout. Neither has any authority over the other and neither is older, which is the plainest case there is. A 你好！ [1] — Hello! B 早上好！ [2] — Good morning! A 你叫什么名字？ [3] — What's your name? B 我叫林峰。 [4] 你呢？ [5] — I'm Lin Feng. And you? A 你好。我叫包。 [6] — Hi, I'm Bao. B 你是学生吗？ [7] — Are you a student? A 我是学生。 [8] 我们是同学。 [9] — I am. We're classmates. B 很高兴认识你。 [10] — Nice to meet you. A 我也很高兴见到你。 [11] — Nice to meet you too. B 再见！ [12] — Bye! A 再见。 [13] — Bye. A short exchange and a parting word, and nearly all of it is pronouns, the verb for being called, the verb for being, and a few set phrases. Three things in it are worth stopping over. The question for a name is built with the question word you met in the second volume, and it sits where the answer will sit: 你叫什么名字？ is literally "you are called what name", with the question word in the object slot and no movement of anything else. English drags the question word to the front and inverts the verb, which is why beginners produce a sentence that begins with the word for what. Do not move it. In Mandarin a question of this kind has exactly the word order of the statement that answers it, and the answer here proves it: 我叫林峰。 is the same frame with a name where the question word was. Next, the two-syllable reply that B tacks on. 你呢？ is a whole turn made of a pronoun and a particle, and it means "and you?" It attaches to whatever was last said and hands the same question back, so it saves you from repeating a question you have just been asked. English does this with rising intonation on the pronoun alone. Mandarin questions can rise at the end too, but here the particle does the work. Last, the closing pair. 很高兴认识你。 is fixed, and so is A's answer with the word for also in front of the adjective. Notice where that word goes: before the thing it applies to, never at the end. English can put "too" at the end of the clause and habitually does, so a common mistake here is a sentence that ends with the word for also. It cannot. Dialogue B A student and a teacher twice her age, in the corridor a few minutes later, so 您 . The student opens with the respectful greeting and never once uses a plain pronoun to the teacher; the teacher answers with the plain one, which is correct in the other direction