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The Best Way to Learn Chinese

In their brilliant song Fagles, The Eagles called out, “This is not the Eagles. This is not Fagles. We’re just a team of no-brainer fans.” I think they hit it on the head with that one because while a great majority of people could classify them as such, the phrase that they use to describe themselves in their song is not the most accurate way to describe them or the kind of team that they have. It is a popular saying in our country and society that says, “We’re a team of no-brainer fans.”

But really, the Eagles aren’t no-brainer fans by any stretch of the imagination. They are probably the greatest football team of all time, but not the greatest team at the same time. That’s just the way it is and for every Super Bowl win, there is quite a sizable loss. As a result, this seemingly simple grammar rule becomes a little more complex.

If you’re having trouble understanding this grammar rule, allow me to ask you a question

What do you normally do when you’re listening to music and the lyrics come to mind? Do you immediately go to the song’s definition in English and try to figure out what each word is? Or do you try to analyze each word on your own and attempt to define it so that you can put it into its proper place on your list?

Well, you pretty much have to do both. When you hear a song and immediately jump to the definition of each word, you are only half way there. You have to analyze the language and then translate your observations into a list.

In Chinese, lists are very important and they are called hanzi

They are basically just lists of things. For instance, in English, we would say “the man and woman were lovers.” If you want to translate this into Chinese, you would simply say, “The man loved the woman.” This is the same sentence, but instead of using the object of the verb, we use the person instead.

Now, the problem with our above example is that, since the word “loved” has two people in the sentence, it will often be used in a dependent position. Instead of “The man loves the woman”, we would translate it as “The man loves the woman”. If you have never encountered this type of vocabulary before, you might think this sounds like Chinese to you… but it’s not.

What happens when you study Chinese? During your first semester abroad in China, you’ll hear all kinds of cool vocabulary. This isn’t because every single word is helpful to you; rather, this is the Chinese way of organizing their language. For example, when you hear the word “man”, there will already be a person present, and that person will be used for an object.