Although “fashionably late,” the Grammar Guide has finally joined the ChinesePod party. Today I would like to explain the purpose of the Grammar Guide, how to use it, what it is now, and what it will be in the future. Before I go on, though, I should say that the Grammar Guide is a ChinesePod premium feature. It’s just one more part of our commitment to making a ChinesePod subscription worth every penny.
The Purpose
Basically, the goal of the Grammar Guide is to answer all your questions about Chinese Grammar. It’s meant to be the guide that I (John Pasden) wish I had when I was studying Chinese. Not only does it cover all the grammatical jargon, it also breaks it down into understandable language and provides lots of concrete examples. Through the magic of the internet, we can make the Grammar Guide entries and explanations heavily interlinked (think Wikipedia), we can tie them to lessons through grammar tags, we can add javascript rollover functionality for the Chinese characters, and we can update the content whenever needed. Pretty cool!
How to Use It
The Grammar Guide is very hierarchical in its structure, reflecting the way traditional grammar is classified and organized. We’re not out to totally destroy the System, and for many reasons such classifications are useful. So if you go into the Grammar Guide through the main page, you can navigate through the various levels and classifications, all the way down to the entry level (word level), a page which also contains sub-entries (usage level). Each entry gets its own page, and that page contains the sub-entries. Each sub-entry is linkable, and it is to these links that the grammar tags will take you when you click on them from a lesson page.
The organization of the Grammar Guide (by levels):
- Main Section (Parts of Speech or Structure)
- Main Category (example: Nouns)
- Type or Topic (is it a further sub-classification or merely related information? Types of nouns include Location Nouns and Time Nouns)
- Specific Category (example: Time Nouns)
- Entry (example: 刚才)
- Sub-entry (in the case of 刚才, there is only one: “Refers to a time in the recent past.”)
This all becomes quite clear when navigating the guide, as the breadcrumbs at the top of the screen show you exactly where you are and allow you to easily jump back up the hierarchy.
What It Is Now
The classification work of the Grammar Guide was enormous. All the categories and classifications had to be set, and then literally thousands of usages had to be given homes within the hierarchy. All this work is done. You can browse the hierarchy to see all that it contains.
Going forward, we will be tagging all Elementary, Intermediate, and Upper Intermediate lessons with grammar tags. The entries and sub-entries for those new tags will be completed as they are needed. We will also be simultaneously going backward through the archive, grammar tagging all the way.
This means that currently many of the entry pages are not accessible (the links are not active) because they are not finished. We have the data in an organized form, but it has not yet been written for the student. Since what is written of the Grammar Guide is now in a form that the student can use, we have decided to launch it.
What It Will Be
Going forward, we have big plans for the Grammar Guide. All lessons will be tagged and heavily integrated. Grammar entry pages will suggest podcasts to reinforce specific grammar points. A sidebar will be added with additional info for each page. The amount of interlinkage, sample usages, and “incorrect usages” will only grow. We are open to all kinds of possibilities, including greater integration with Qing Wen and other parts of the site. This is only the beginning.
As the architect and director of the Grammar Guide, it feels great to be finally releasing it. I will do my best to make it the very best guide there is to Chinese Grammar, and I will be putting in some serious hours to make it as complete as possible ASAP.
As always, we welcome your feedback!
-John Pasden
中文 Chinese
Bazza 白锐 Says:
July 16th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
John, you’re a genius. Excellent work.
Henning Says:
July 16th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Yes,
structure and interlinking are great.
It seems as if some points are in Chinese while others are in English. I guess the objective is to have it bilingual?
I could imagine that you later even add specific exercises for the different grammar points so I can eventually throw away my Schaum…
John Says:
July 16th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
Henning,
The finished Guide will be partially bilingual.
And yes, exercises are certainly within the realm of possibility…
goulnik (郭力毅) Says:
July 16th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
amazing, the grammar guide I wished I had now… can’t wait for all contents and taggging
Foleadu Says:
July 16th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
What an ambitious undertaking! Really amazing. It looks very good. It be might be nice on the first page to have a list of what is/isn’t done, since a lot of it seems to be under construction. That way we can check back every now and then and see what’s been updated. Anyway, right now it is just fun to dig through the guide and see what’s there.
Also, I could imagine having a discussion/blog for each page or main heading to discuss relevant topics.
I’m certainly glad I got the Premium subscription - very worth it with all the new features you’re adding.
Frank Says:
July 17th, 2007 at 12:49 am
Absolutely brilliant. Kudos to you, John, and the rest of the team for making your vision a reality. The Premium subscription keeps earning its keep.
Rock on.
John Thompson Says:
July 17th, 2007 at 1:52 am
Is something wrong with the guide? For example, I go to http://chinesepod.com/learnchi.....-sentences, and the box says “No records”. It’s like this for most of the links I tried. I just upgraded to a premium subscription, the grammar guide being a chief incentive.
Also, I’m disappointed to find the examples in characters, though with the fly-over pinyin and translation. This makes it much less convenient for me to use, since I don’t plan to learn characters for some time yet. Am I really unique in putting off character learning until I get some spoken Chinese down? It seems that by the time you master enough characters, you would probably already know a fair amount of the grammer.
I have the same complaint about the online dialogs. I wish there was a button I could press to have it cycle between pinyin, characters, and English, with the default setting in my profile.
Are there any plans for a printable grammer guide? I’d rather just print out the whole thing and read it systematically.
-John Thompson
AuntySue Says:
July 17th, 2007 at 4:02 am
Thanks, John, for this tremendous effort. Of course we never wanted to be admonished to memorise delegated grammar lessons, but this thing gives us a way to answer our burning questions and check our developing personal theories about how the language works, in real time, something we’ve yearned for for a long time.
I fear I’m going to have a bit of trouble with the English. I’ve never encountered words like… oh dear, I can’t even remember them. You know, the P word and other words that are used by people who have already studied grammar. I know what verbs and nouns are, but the rest of that grammar-describing language is harder than the Chinese sentences they discuss. Any chance of some kind of grammar words and concepts glossary?
fengmaode Says:
July 17th, 2007 at 4:38 am
First, great work. The additions keep getting better and better.
Second, I agree with John Thompson on the pinyin point. I also don’t plan on learning characters until my speaking ability is at a certain level. Yeah, there’s been a certain level of passive character recognition that has occured just from my exposure to the language, but my teacher recommended that we focus on pinyin until our speaking ability was at a particular level, and then tackle characters. I would also like a button to switch between pinyin and characters.
John Says:
July 17th, 2007 at 9:43 am
Thanks, everyone, for the encouragement.
John Thompson,
Three issues here:
1. For the first phase, we have been focusing much more on the Parts of Speech part than the Structure part. The “no records” error you got was in the Structure part. Still, it sounds like there is a page missing, so I will get on that.
2. We have to assume that students want to learn characters as a default. We are trying to include more short, simple sentences with simpler grammar points. However, we are using the same rollover javascript in the Grammar Guide as we are in other parts of the site, which means that the same scripts that show pinyin when you mouse over them can also be used to swap characters for pinyin using a method such as Dave Lancashire’s traditional Chinese plugin. We will consider something like this for the future.
3. A printed version is not out of the question, but we have a lot of work to get done before it would be ready for that. You’d lose a lot of the “interlinking” functionality in a printed version, too.
John Says:
July 17th, 2007 at 9:46 am
AuntySue,
If the language in the Grammar Guide is too full of jargon, we’ll revise it until it’s clearer. I’ll admit that there are a few pages which could be revised but have not been yet in the interest of getting more pages up for the launch.
This is what’s good about a web-based Grammar Guide: anytime it needs to be revised or added to, it’s a snap.
Note that many of the tougher terms in the Grammar Guide are linked. So if you need to know what an “attributive” is, you can just click on it and open it in a new tab to remind yourself.
LostInAsia Says:
July 17th, 2007 at 10:24 am
The grammar guide is definitely looking good. I’ve seen quite a few examples of correct sentences with a green checkmark–I’m also really looking forward to more “incorrect usages”. As an English teacher I’m well aware of how much Chinese-English my students use, and I assume that my Chinese is every bit as riddled by… uh… English-Chinese?
I do hope you can, beside the links, somehow add little labels for “No content yet”, or whatever, because I kept exploring by link (mainly following the English words that I didn’t understand at all), and getting to the last level only to find no information yet.
I suspect once the content is filled out the jargon will be less of a problem, because we’ll just follow the link and get to an example, or a tag will start us off at the “bottom” level and we’ll suddenly realize there’s a name for a sentence type.
Thanks also for increasing the value of the Premium subscription. Six months ago I had my doubts about the value, since I seemed to be using it mainly for example sentences that I could probably have got from a dictionary. Now it keeps getting better and better.
敦禮 Says:
July 17th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
John, would you have the time to give us your thoughts on how the general user(newbie,elementary, intermediate, and advanced)can use the grammar guide in their daily study of Cpods podcast/vocab/expansion/exercise routine?
I am hearing the interlinking and tag jargon but I’m not clear on how the general user will implement that into study.
A question that comes to mind is; is the grammar guide to be used as a resource when one has a question on how to say somethine and/or is it going to refine our understanding of specific vocab words in every lesson-providing structural boundaries for the proper use of specific vocab?
John Says:
July 17th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
敦禮,
Currently, we don’t tag Newbie or Advanced (Media) lessons with grammar tags. The rationale is that we don’t want Newbies to be overcome by “grammar anxiety,” and we feel that Advanced students should have a handle on most of the Grammar Guide content already (or have rendered it irrelevant through unconscious acquisition). We may revisit this policy in the future.
So, for example, an Intermediate learner might go to today’s lesson, Snacks. He sees two grammar tags: 还是, 又. Maybe the learner was never totally clear on the usage of 还是, so he clicks on it.
He is taken to a specific usage of 还是, with plenty of examples. He spends some time going over the sentences using the rollovers and mentally comparing the explanation above with the usage in the sentences. Scrolling down, he sees another usage of 还是. He repeats the process, mentally contrasting the two usages.
Scrolling back up, he notices there is also a link to 还. He clicks on that. He notices that there are a lot more usages of 还, so he starts exploring those.
In the process, he stumbles across a link to Comparative Sentences. That’s another thing he has difficulty with, so he clicks on that. [Note: this page isn't done yet; sorry!] Soon he’s browsing through lots of different comparative sentence structures and reading examples.
The heavy interlinkage in the Grammar Guide supports a “browsing” style of learning, just like it does on Wikipedia. You click on what piques your interest, or on what you don’t understand.
I hope that makes it clearer. The vision will be realized in the days to come.
Lee Says:
July 18th, 2007 at 10:32 am
One way you could protect true Newbies while supporting grammar tags for higher level students mining the Newbie content would be to look at the level the student has assigned themselves. If they’ve set themselves as a Newbie then this hides grammar tags, higher levels have access.
This could apply to other things like the fact that advanced and Media lessons don’t have english summaries. As a lower level student I often wish that those lessons had english summaries to easily see if there is anything I may be interested in exploring, but I can see the logic for leaving it out for true advanced students.
Bazza 白锐 Says:
July 18th, 2007 at 6:11 pm
Are there any plans to have the grammar guide on the mobile site as well? That would be cool.
pharmine Says:
July 19th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
Wow, this is what I’ve been most looking forward to.
Thanks John and the team!
Mike in Singapore Says:
July 23rd, 2007 at 6:50 pm
John
I love the grammar guide and I think for very new Newbies the grammar attached to Elle’s and Intermediates and above is just another way to explore sentences in Chinese. Plus with Davud’srolling character translation a person like me can learn much more on the days when the show is a bit over my head.
So yes with all the linking and browsing now and later will be great. But for now a daily ‘FIX’ of The Fix and now Grammar is just awesome and ruining my professionalism in our Japanese Office.
I can’t wait to get to Singapore where I will have a bit more freedom. (Surrounded my Singaporeans and a German or two.
Perhaps Jenny and Ken should mention the grammar tag specifically every now and then during shows. Or you and Jenny might do the same during an Intermediate show to entice a climbing Elle to take a look.
Mike in Singapore
(well Tokyo) or living at the subway stop that means “small horse path along a rice paddy” who can add the Hanzi to that ? It is how I remember where I live at the moment.
Dianainchina Says:
July 25th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
I just love your grammar guide…it definitely suits my way of browsing for loose connections or to clarify puzzles and misunderstandings.A fantastic resource in progress…& many thanks ,John for the massive task in putting it together.
Mike Says:
August 6th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
Is it possible to see some Grammar guide screenshots or sample pages so I can get a better idea of how this looks/works before I upgrade my subscription? Or is there a demo period of some sort?
pharmine Says:
August 9th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Mike,
For a Grammar guide screenshot, see Kenta’s photo:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/knt13/827056043/
AuntySue Says:
August 19th, 2007 at 7:16 am
OK, I wanted to use it this morning but didn’t have enough metaknowledge to enter.
I’d heard of a sentence pattern that I wanted to see explained so that I could start using it with confidence. What I had heard was was that this is a pattern:
zai4 … ye3 bu4 neng2 (bu4) …
no matter how …, you can’t (not) …
e.g. no matter how busy you are you can’t not eat.
All I can say about the grammar is that “matter” is a noun, “can’t” is a verb, the curly thing is a comma and the whole lot is a sentence.
So how do I find the right door for something like this?
AuntySue Says:
August 19th, 2007 at 7:17 am
… and I’m not sure that matter is a noun.