Occasional Tales

Well, I hope. I mentioned somewhere that I couldn’t find anything about 得 in Chinese for Beginners. That surprised me, because although the book doesn’t cover all the different aspects of various grammatical constructions in Chinese, it’s quite comprehensive in the range of material it covers. I looked at the word index again. Ah, there was 得 and I was directed to Unit 6 which was about, er, 的. So I looked through the table of contents and found 得 was discussed in Units 39 and 47. I looked at the word index again and found that the numbers had been mixed up because under 的 the relevant units were given as 39 and 47. So what does the Chinese for Beginners say about 得? Unit 39 has (with minor corrections to the English) Post-得 adjectives expressing a comment on an action In the pattern "Subj. + V + 得 + Adj.", the adjective expresses a comment on the action indicated by the verb before 得. From the context in which this kind of sentence occurs, the action must be a ...

Insanity, embrace me in that firm 34C bosom. As Chris's comments to the previous post reveal, this whole thing gets murkier and messier by the minute. (See, it's even making me alliterate. Not a good sign.) Obviously, the construction is [verb]得[verb] and, depending on the nature of the verb, we might be talking about a consequence or manner (the latter functioning pretty much like an adverb). Anyway, let me address the following from Chris's last comment to the previous post. No,no,no.... 很快地跑着，NOT 很快得跑着 This seems to be PC and R causing confusion by using pinyin . They say 14.1 Adverbials of manner consist of adjectives, normally two-syllable, followed by the particle de . From the index, I can only assume that the de of tā hěn kuài de pǎozhe is 得, although at first I thought it was 地 – and why not? I'm seeing something functioning as an adverb. It's telling me something about the action. But after I checked again, it seemed that the marker was 得. Huh? Yeah...