A Chinese Woman's Face at Night

她安慰著他，然而她不由得想到了她自己的月光中的臉，那嬌脆的輪廓，眉與眼，美得不近情理，美得渺茫，她緩緩垂下頭去。

She comforted him, then unwillingly thought about the glow of the moon on her face, that delicate feminine outline, the eyebrows and eyes, an uncommon beauty, an obscure beauty, she gently lowered her head.


傾城之戀，作者 張愛玲

Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang

The Most Basic Rules of Chinese Sentences

Modern Mandarin unfortunately does not have a standard primer or document that every Mandarin speaker agrees upon.  English had at least three centuries of debate and scholarship to form the basic rules of English grammar, but Mandarin had less than a century due to political reasons.  

Fear not!  Here are a few basic rules that govern Mandarin:

1)  Basic sentences follow the subject-verb-object structure (SVO):

The most famous example of this sentence in English is "I kick the ball" (There's a paper written by an academic, but unfortunately I can't find the source).  You can easily identify the sentence components.

The sentence in Mandarin is: "我踢球."  It literally translates to "I/kick/ball."  Notice that "the" is missing, which leads to the next rule.

2)  Chinese is a pronoun drop language, or pro-drop.

After the pronoun is mentioned once, it usually doesn't appear afterwards.  A Mandarin speaker who is starting to learn English tends to drop pronouns.  It may sound blunt and a bit rude, but the overuse of pronouns sounds awkward not just in conversation, but in prose as well.  

For instance, in the English sentence "The book is front of the pencil" translates to "書在鉛筆前面,” which literally translates to "Book/at/pencil/front."

3) Chinese is a left-branching language.

This means that the modifier of basic elements of a sentence placed to the left.  English is a hybrid of left and right branching, but Chinese tends to be more strictly left branching.  So going back to the first example, if I want to add that the ball is yellow, I say "我踢藍球."

Most other rules you have to memorize, play by ear, or apply to specific cases.  Hopefully, this is a good starting point!

The Art of Mandarin

A friend of mine who's a profession writer told me that a blog must accomplish one of two things: express relatability or express expertise.

Even after publishing around 100 posts, my blog had content, but it didn't have a sense of purpose.  I left my blog on hiatus over the summer partly because I was afraid my blogs would be ignored.  I assumed that most people would rather consume infotainment, nothing that would hurt their heads. But I realized that I didn't need to cater to people who wanted distraction and entertainment.  I needed to write for the sake of writing, or art for the sake of art.

The other reason for my hiatus was because I started writing my novel.  Yes, I'm one of those people at social gatherings who start my conversation with "I'm working on this book about...," only to drone on about a half coherent plot.  My novel will tie closely to the themes of my blog.

Why titled, "The Art of Mandarin?"  "Tranquil Polmelo" doesn't roll off the tongue. My blog also isn't a guide to teach people Chinese.  There are plenty of websites that can help you the basics, or Google linguistics papers on the grammatical uses of particular Chinese words.

My blog is going to be about how Chinese sentences convey meaning and how meaning coveys the art of writing Mandarin.