I saw a YouTube video by Tony Marsh the other day showing how one can exploit AI for some grammar drilling exercises and vocabulary building. You can watch the video in question here.

Because I don’t have ChatGPT, I used the AI-driven copilot built into the Windows Edge browser. The basic idea is to create a simple matrix containing grammar forms and to ask your AI of choice to provide variations of that matrix using other words. So, for instance, I provided examples of the basic 我喜欢。。。 (I like…) constructions and asked the AI to complete that sentence.

This is what it looks like in pinyin:

Notice that not all sentence contain the 我喜欢 form (perhaps I should have used a better prompt?) but this method is still useful nonetheless.

I asked the AI to create this table again, only now using simplified hanzi, and voilà!

While this approach tastes a bit like distributionalism (linguistics) and behavourism (language teaching), it’s easy to see how one can reap benefits by using it.

I will definitely print these tables and have them at hand somewhere so I can take a look at them from time to time.

DISCLAIMER: I’m only a student of Mandarin, a complete and absolute beginner. I could be wrong about some of the things I write about here and I if that were the case I would love to be corrected.

Because I speak Spanish, I like that Chinese has a ser/estar distinction. In Spanish, we use ser for more permanent states (Soy argentino, Es un hombre fuerte) and estar for more temporary situations or conditions (Estoy contento, Él está en lo cierto). To a certain extent, this seems to be the case with 是 and 在.

I say to a certain extent, because there are differences. The most obvious one is that Mandarin doesn’t need a linking verb to join a subject to a predicative adjective (intensifier 很 probably underwent a process of grammaticalization, I suppose, so that it fulfills the function of a copulative verb).

Hence,

• 他很高。(tā hěn gāo)

• He [is] (very?) tall.

This is made more apparent by the fact that 很 is lost when forming a Y/N question (他高吗?).

Spanish on the other hand requires the verb “to be”.

• Él es alto.

• Él está alto. (This shows surprise on the part of the speaker about the fact that someone else, a teenager most likely, has grown taller. This is true at least in my variety of Spanish.)

Yet 在 is like estar in the sense that it can be followed by a locative (and that it is used to express progressive aspect).

• 我在中国。(wǒ zài zhōngguó)

Yo estoy en China.

• 他在学校。(tā zài xuéxiào)

Él está en la escuela

And this is where it gets more interesting: 在 doesn’t appear to need a preposition, or perhaps it contains (semantically encodes?) a preposition (confront 在 with en in the Spanish examples). Mandarin allows the following type of sentences, where 在 is used as a preposition to indicate place:

• 我住在北京。 (wǒ zhùzài běijīng.)

Yo vivo en Beijing.

Ella no vive en la escuela (= on campus).

I don’t know enough Mandarin to read what linguists have to say about 在, but if I ever get to that point in my language journey, I’ll definitely study some Mandarin linguistics.

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EDIT: I’ve just read a short texty by Julian K. Wheatley where he suggests thinking of predicative adjectives as some type of verbal expression containing the verb to be (hence, 好 means ‘be good’, 忙 means ‘be busy’, 累 means ‘be tired’, and so on). This seems to solve the issue, as it adequately explains Y/N question forms and short answers:

忙吗? but also: 忙不忙? (Are you busy?)

很忙 / 不忙 (Yes, I am. / No, I’m not.)

There are a few basic notions about adjectives that all of us who have studied basic grammar surely remember.

1.- They modify nouns.

2.- In English, they can occur either in a pre-nominal (e.g. The red car) or is a post-nominal position (e.g. The car is red, The car looks red to me). The former is usually called ‘attributive adjective’ and the latter, which needs some type of copulative verb, we call ‘predicative adjective’.

Languages will treat adjectives differently. For instance, Spanish prefers its attributive adjectives after the noun: El auto rojo instead of El rojo auto. Having an adjective appearing before the noun in Spanish is considered to be in a marked position. Additionally, changing the position of an adjective in Spanish can sometimes result in changes of meaning, from a descriptive to a more evaluative one. We can thus compare Un comentario cierto (‘a truthful comment’) with Un cierto comentario(‘a certain comment’), or Un hombre pobre (i.e. a man without any money) with Un pobre hombre (i.e. a man worthy of pity). Of course, this is only true of qualifying adjectives (it’s almost impossible to hear a Spanish speaker say, for instance, ‘Esa telefónica línea‘ or ‘Aquella lunar roca‘, where adjectives are more classifying than qualifying, really).

English spices things up by allowing other categories (nouns, -ing forms) to have a pre-modifying function: ‘a confession box’, ‘a football match’, ‘running shoes’, ‘a walking stick’.

But Mandarin, as usual, is weirder in its simplicity. As I explained in my previous post, post-modifying elements in Mandarin don’t require a copulative verb. And pre-modifying elements take structural particle 的.

Hence we get,

• 咖啡很热。 (The coffee is hot)

• 美丽的卧室。 (The beautiful bedroom)

This particle also allows for an even weirder way of forming relative clauses, if you can call them that:

• 那个我昨天喝的咖啡。

(That’s the coffee [which] I drank yesterday).

How languages find their way make things work is truly amazing. I hope to be able to learn more about Mandarin and its grammatical oddities.