Adventures in Mandarin

Ok, it's finally time for the next lesson in Volume 1 of PAVC! Lesson 2!

Grammar Notes:

This lesson goes over stative verbs and introduces the following sentence structures:

我很忙。

我不忙。

我不太忙。

我很忙，你也很忙。

你忙不忙？

Which basically can be formulated as:

Affirmative: N/PN + ADV + SV.

Negative: N/PN + NEG + SV. -or- N/PN + NEG + ADV + SV.

Question: N/PN + SV + NEG + SV?

Vocabulary Notes:

不 is usually unstressed in the SV question sentence type.

Hanzi Learned:

早，趙，小，姐，張，久，見，啊，很，謝，也，這，太，天，氣，熱，去，上，課，們，忙，再，冷

Exercises:

Spoiler

Section 1

 

1. 李小姐不高。(In my edition, 李小姐 is indeed smaller than 張先生. In the edition pictured above, they look about the same.)
2. 王太太很熱。
3. 不熱，李小姐不熱。她很冷。
4. 冷，李小姐很冷。
5. 高， 王先生很高。

 

Section 2

 

 

1. 不忙。
2. 不累。
3. 不熱，我很冷。
4. 不餓。
5. 不渴。

 

I'd like to start this blog off with some notes, and the first few exercises from PAVC. I'll also make note of the hanzi I learn as well.

Grammar Notes:

This lesson, in addition to going over basic greetings and asking about names, introduced the following structures:

-Sentences with 姓，叫，是

The textbook notes that 姓 is used only with last names, and 叫 is used with either full names or first names.

It also puts 是 in this group, but I'm not sure if it's possible to say something like 「我是王大衛」or not.

The textbook doesn't give any such examples.

- Questions with 嗎

-Using question words to ask questions.

The interesting thing to note here, is that the question word goes where the answer would go.

So you can have「他姓什麼？」which is different from English word order.

-Reciprocal questions with 呢

Vocabulary Notes:

不 is generally pronounced bu4, unless it is followed by another 4th tone where it changes to bu2.

哪 is pronounced na3 when it means "which", but it is pronounced as nei3 when it means "which one" (a contraction of 哪一)

Hanzi Learned:

您，貴，姓，李，先，生，王，我，叫，好，是，美，國，人，嗎，不，英，你，什，麼，名，字，哪，呢，中，他，她，誰，台，臺，灣，華

Exercises:

I'm going to put the exercises behind a spoiler tag.