Item — HN Reader

1. any example on how this is confusing? 把 is "to do to". like 你吃了饭 you ate rice vs 你把饭吃了you did eat the rice etc

2. Its grammatically correct to say "我在走" but it sounds better when its a "pair" so colloquially it uses a 词, which is a pair of characters which may just say the same thing. you could also say 我在走着 which adds no extra meaning but pads it to be a pair

3. 了 is meant for something in the past, past perfect tense is not the same as past tense, past perfect tense is about ambiguity not time.

4. 们 has the 人 radical, so its mean for humans. Otherwise you're to use counting particles instead, plus 很多 or 几 or some other particle to emphasise it.

2 comments

1. The interpretation is straightforward but the construction is not: why is 他把饭吃了 grammatical but 他把我帮了 not, despite both being SOV constructions you can make SVO (他饭吃，他帮我）?

2. 走路 I agree colloquially you can say 我在走 even if it feels a bit fragmenty. I do think there’s a lot of difficulty again in the construction:

He’s walking: 他在走（路）

He walks quickly: 他走路很快/他走得很快 but not 他走很快

He walks to my home: 他走到我家 but not 他走路到我家

3. I guess this one depends on your view of past tense and if past perfect you consider a subset of past tense or separate: in any case 了 is not a past tense marker, since you can use it to talk about the future (e.g. 他要来了 for “he is about to arrive”)

4. I just wanted to point out that 们 is not a generic pluralizer and the generic pluralizer is usually implicit: besides, particles lie all the time in Chinese: half the words with the 纟 radical have nothing to do with silk!

Mandarin beginner here. On #2, my pet theory is that it's easier to disambiguate zǒulù than just zǒu in the spoken language. My teacher often says "word's character" (e.g. yī de yīshēng, 醫的醫生, probably bad example and/or just wrong, to distinguish from other characters that sound like 醫). I once calculated that there are only about 600 different sounds in Mandarin -- not many more than toki pona! -- so if you tend to pair sounds into concepts, that's a much richer pool to draw from.