2.1 Word Order: Subject–Verb–Object — Epoché
What you will be able to do Build a Chinese sentence in the order subject, verb, object, and recognise that English uses that order too. Read sentences in it and say what each word is doing, without translating first. State the four pieces of good news: the basic order is the English one, verbs have one form, nouns have one form (no plural ending on ordinary nouns and no case), and nothing agrees with anything. Explain why "no endings" is not "no grammar", and name what carries the work instead. Prerequisites : 1.9, which gave you the first fifty characters and the words built from them; 1.10 and 1.11 took the set to the commonest 150. The quoted sentences in this lesson use those characters, the words of earlier lessons and the new words listed at the end, with one exception: 写 "to write", in 我写中文 , which you will meet properly later. If any other shape here looks unfamiliar, go back to 1.9 Characters . This is the first lesson of the Grammar volume, and it begins with the part of Chinese that will cost you least. For an English speaker the basic order of a Chinese sentence is not something to be learned but something to be recognised: you already put the doer first, the action second and the thing acted on third, and so does Chinese. That agreement is worth setting out plainly before the lessons that follow start pointing at the places where the two languages part company. Most courses open with a hard thing, on the theory that it had better be got out of the way. This volume opens with an easy one, because a beginner who meets measure words in week one concludes that Chinese grammar is a thicket and never notices how much of the grammar of English is simply absent here. Four pieces of good news The first is the order itself. In an ordinary Chinese statement the subject comes first, the verb second and the object third. There is no verb-final order to get used to, no rule that pushes the verb to the second position, and no need to hunt for the verb at the end of a long clause. When you read a Chinese sentence from left to right you meet its parts in the order your English-speaking instinct expects. The second is that verbs have exactly one form. There is no third-person singular ending, no past form, no participle and no infinitive marker. The verb meaning "eat" is written 吃 and said chī , and it is 吃 in "I eat", "he eats", "they ate", "she has eaten" and "to eat". Nothing in this course will ever be an irregular verb, because there are no regular ones either. The third is that nouns have one form too. An ordinary noun has no plural ending: "apple" is 苹果 , said píng guǒ , whether there is one apple or a crate of them. (The suffix 们 from lesson 1.9 makes the plural of pronouns, as in 我们 , and of some words for people, but it does not go on a word like 苹果 .) Nor is there case marking, and this is the part English speakers find most surprising, because it holds for pronouns as well. The word for "he" is 他 in both jobs. English pronouns change between subject and object (I and me, he and him, she and her, we and us, they and them), and none of those second forms has a Chinese counterpart for you to learn. The fourth is that nothing agrees with anything. There is no grammatical gender, so no word has to be adjusted to match another word's gender, and there are no articles at all, so the choice between "the", "a" and nothing does not arise. Adjectives take no endings for number or gender, and verbs cannot agree with subjects because they have no forms to agree with. Put those four together and a large part of what a European-language course spends its first year on is simply not here. There is a cost, and the rest of this volume is about paying it, but it falls later. This is the lesson where you get something for nothing. The pattern Write it as three slots in a fixed order. The first slot is the subject: who or what the sentence is about. It can be a pronoun, such as 我 wǒ for "I", 你 nǐ for "you", 他 tā for "he" and 她 tā for "she", or a noun, or a phrase. Note that "he" and "she" are said exactly alike and differ only on the page, so a Chinese speaker telling a story out loud does not tell you the sex of the person in it unless some other word does the work. The second slot is the verb: one form, no ending, and nothing in front of it for English to , do or did . The third slot is the object: no article in front, no plural ending on it. If the verb takes no object the slot stays empty and the sentence is two words long. Sentences end with a full stop written as a small circle, 。 , and there are no spaces between words. The sentences below are all taken from this course's corpus rather than invented, each with an English translation. Read down the first column before you look at the second. Chinese English 我想你。 [1] I miss you. 我喜欢他。 [2] I like him. 我吃苹果。 [3] I eat apples. 他吃苹果。 [4] He eats apples. 她吃苹果。 [5] She eats apples. 他有苹果。 [6] He has an apple. 我吃面包。 [7] I eat bread. 我去买面包。 [8] I'm going to buy some bread. 我听音乐。 [9] I listen to music. 我们喜欢音乐。 [10] We like music. 我写中文。 [11] I write Chinese. 他说中文。 [12] He speaks Chinese. 我喜欢猫。 [13] I like cats. 我们学习音乐。 [14] We study music. Reading the table Look at rows three, four and five. The Chinese differs in one character, the first one, and that character is the subject. The verb is the same three times. Now look at the English: "I eat apples", "He eats apples", "She eats apples". The English verb took an ending twice, and none of that movement has anything behind it in the Chinese. It is in the English because English requires it, not because the Chinese said it. That is the most useful thing to take from this lesson: the verb never changes, so time is not carried by the verb. That does not mean any tense will do. A plain action sentence such as rows three to five, with nothing added, normally says what someone does in general or as a habit: "he eats apples", not "he ate apples". (The situation can also make it a plan or a suggestion, as in row eig