A few very simple beginner questions

[jachristen]

Hello. I recently started studying Chinese as a hobby. The resources I'm currently using are Rosetta Stone (for pronunciation and speaking practice), nciku (for confirmation regarding definition and proper stroke order for writing practice), and Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar (obviously, for grammar). I was hoping I could get some clarification regarding a few basic questions:

1) Regarding 在: my grammar book says this indicates the verb is happening in the present, but lists another character as indicative of the progressive tense. Grammatically speaking, does 在 simply provide more information about a sentence then while not itself being indicative of progressive tense? Can 我在睡觉 and 我睡觉 mean the same thing grammatically, with the former simply being more informative?　

2) Regarding 不 and 没: my grammar book says 不 is for present, future, and habitual negations while 没 is for past tense negations, but Rosetta Stone seems to use 没在 for present-tense negations (e.g. 这个男孩子没在开车。). What is the explanation for this?

3) Regarding usage of certain verbs: certain verbs seem to be given different objects for different subjects (e.g. 这个男人在跑步 vs 这匹马在跑, or 这个男人在游泳 vs 这只狗游水 vs 这条鱼游。). Is doing something like dropping the 步 for a person less formal, insulting, or simply ungrammatical?

Thanks in advance. I'm very new to the language, so please be forgiving of questions that probably have very obvious answers.

[Peiruo]

Nice questions! I am looking forward to the answers

[renzhe]

1) It indicates that the action is taking place. Chinese doesn't have tenses in an indo-european sense, so it doesn't mean it is taking place now, just that it is/was in the process of happening when something else happened.

For example:

你给我打电话的时候，我在看书 - when you called me, I was reading a book

With your examples, 我睡觉 means "I sleep" and 我在睡觉 means "I am sleeping". You can, for example, say 我每天都睡觉 (I sleep every day). With 我在睡觉, you are in the process of sleeping, either at the time of the sentence, or at the time when something else happened.

A quick and dirty crutch is to think of 在 as -ing in English.

2) A good question. Generally, it's like you say -- 不 is for present and habitual negation, 没 is used for the past tense (and always with 有).

But both work with 在 if used for progressive tense, and I'm not sure why. Perhaps someone else can shed a light on it.

I think that 没在 is more spoken (I don't remember reading it much), but I might be wrong.

3) Think of 跑步 as a verb, not a verb+object. It means "to jog", and implies a human, and it would sound odd when used for a horse. If you say 这个男人在跑, it carries a different connotation, it means that he is running, like trying to catch a bus or escape a policeman.

With the second example, I think that you could use 游泳 for all of them, it's a stylistic choice

This is my personal view of them, but I'm neither a native speaker not terribly advanced, so do wait for other people to chime in.

[HashiriKata]

Edit: please ignore!

Edited March 5, 2010 at 10:45 PM by HashiriKata

[taylor04]

You can say 没在??? I can't recall ever hearing this, can someone shed some light on it for me?

[HashiriKata]

Try searching for "没在睡觉" in Google.

[imron]

You can say 没在???

Yep, very common. I hear it all the time.

[jachristen]

Thanks a lot guys, especially renzhe. That really clears things up.

[Altair]

I like Renzhe's answers.

This is my personal view of them, but I'm neither a native speaker not terribly advanced, so do wait for other people to chime in.

This goes double for me and what I say below.

Chinese doesn't have tenses in an indo-european sense, so it doesn't mean it is taking place now, just that it is/was in the process of happening when something else happened.

In all modern European languages I am aware of, time relative to the moment of speaking is the most important component of tense and is normally an obligatory part of main verbs. In Chinese, time reference is also normally an obligatory part of every utterance, but it is never expressed by the main verb and need have no special relationship to the moment of speaking.

In Chinese, time reference is indicated by the topic, which, however, may be left unexpressed if the context is clear. Even if there is no verbal context, the speaker and listener are presumed to share the time and place of their communication and so this will also be a default part of the topic. Chinese also has particles, adverbs, and helping verbs that can express time relative to the time reference expressed by the topic, such as progressiveness, or on-going time.

In my view, 我在睡觉 is a perfectly normal and adequate way to translate "I am sleeping, but the two are not really equivalent. As Renzhe shows, 我在睡觉 could also easily mean: "I was sleeping." Some might say that 我在睡觉 is vague or ambiguous, but I think this is not really the best way to think of it. 我在睡觉 indicates an action with precision, but the time reference must be understood from the unexpressed time topic. If the identity of this topic is precise, then the sentence is equally precise. If the identity of this topic is vague, then the sentence is equally vague.

我在睡觉 actually means something like: "It is a case of my being in the process of sleeping." Whether the sleeping is occurring now or whether it was occurring yesterday at 10:53 am will only be determined by the time reference in the unexpressed topic.

But both work with 在 if used for progressive tense, and I'm not sure why. Perhaps someone else can shed a light on it.

I think that 没在 is more spoken (I don't remember reading it much), but I might be wrong.

My speculation is that 没 originally negated existence, while 不 originally negated identity. This means that if you use 没 with an action, you are indicating the failure of that action to exist. Although there is nothing in my English sentence that grammatically indicates a past time, it is implied by the nature of negating the occurrence of an action. If you use 不 with an action, you negate its identity and its relevance to the utterance.

I guess that if you say 我不在看书, you may be indicating more that what you are doing is not reading. If you say 我没在看书, I think you may be indicating more that "You have not been reading."

这个男人在游泳 vs 这只狗游水

I know that there are some European languages that differentiate between a fish swimming and a person swimming. I had assumed that Chinese made a similar distinction, but could be wrong. I had thought that 游泳 applied to people and that 游水 applied to fish.

By the way, is 这条鱼游 really acceptable, with no other complement at the end? I would have thought that for the the rhythm you would have to add 着 at the end and say 这条鱼游着.

[jachristen]

我在睡觉 actually means something like: "It is a case of my being in the process of sleeping."

Hmm. If 在 is "being in the process of doing something," then what is 着? How do they differ?

By the way, is 这条鱼游 really acceptable, with no other complement at the end? I would have thought that for the the rhythm you would have to add 着 at the end and say 这条鱼游着.

If it's not, I hope someone who knows speaks up; I like the speech practice of Rosetta Stone, but I'm wary of its grammar (perhaps irrationally; I've yet to see an example of it teaching something incorrectly).

Thanks so much for the response, it was very informative.

[chrix]

So I'm not so sure about this "time topic" thing, wouldn't it just be enough to say that whereas English encodes both tense and aspect in its predicates, Chinese only does aspect? It's clear that languages also have time expressions typically expressed as adverbials, but I think you get this across the board.

[renzhe]

Hmm. If 在 is "being in the process of doing something," then what is 着? How do they differ?

you know what? You ask some really good questions.

I think that 在 indicates that you are doing something at a certain time (e.g. you were doing something when a phone call came, you are doing something right now, etc.), and that 着 indicates that a process is ongoing. They are not interchangeable, as they express slightly different things.

Sorry, that's a rubbish explanation, and likely wrong too.

[chrix]

About these 跑步 游泳 verbs, this is a good question. There might be collocation preferences, but they're not clear, in the sense of that there is a clear-cut rule that would differentiate between humans and and animals. One would need to do a good corpus study to answer that.

But I disagree that 跑步 means "jog", it means "run". "jog" would be 慢跑. But it still seems 跑步 is usually preferred for humans, but as I said without a good corpus, it'd be hard to say (relying on Google numbers is not good).

游泳: I first thought 游动 might be a good alternative for animals, but it seems that it means something slightly different, like "moving about", and fish do move about in the water, and that would be used to describe fish in the ocean, rather than humans swimming at the beach....

[renzhe]

You're right. The wikipedia page for 跑步 shows a galloping horse.

It's just that I've mostly encountered the word in a sporting sense, and it summoned the image of a horse with Nike shoes and an iPod doing the laps in the local park.... For some reason, it seems odd to use it for a horse

[chrix]

About 在/着: Standard grammars say the following:

A. activity verbs usually take 在

This is the vast majority of verbs.

Example:

李四在解释文法

Lisi is explaining the grammar

However, there are dialects of Mandarin that also use 在V着..(呢) or V着..呢 for activity verbs.

B. posture verbs usually take 着

it's a small number of verbs denoting "postures or physical disposition of an entity at a location", for instance 坐 站 蹲 歇 跪 躺 停 睡 etc.

他在房子里站着

He is sitting in the house

There's another dialectal use of V着呢 which is to function as an intensifier.

C. activity verbs signaling states associated with their activity meanings take 着

(Yip and Rimmington differ from Li and Thompson in their analysis of C.)

The difference can be best illustrated by the following example:

他在穿皮鞋

He is putting on his leather shoes

他穿着皮鞋

He is wearing his leather shoes

D. Furthermore, 着 can be used in complex sentences:

小狗摇着尾巴跑了

The small dog ran away while wagging its tail

So here the 着 marked clause represents some kind of background to the main clause. In this function 着 can mark many different types of verbs, but the activity must still be durative, so it can't be used for instantaneous activities such as 死 or 掉....

[chrix]

I think didactically, it would make sense to keep those two clearly apart, saying that 在 is some kind of progressive aspect (associated with activities) and 着 is some kind of continuative aspect (associated with states). Posture verbs would fall under states in this case, but I think it would make sense.

[Shi Tong]

Chrix.. that's a perfect explaination...

他在穿皮鞋

He is putting on his leather shoes

他穿着皮鞋

He is wearing his leather shoes

BTW on the subject of mae and bu..

Would I be right in saying that mae zai and bu zai have the difference as in this example:

If you are a parent and you call up the school looking for your child, you would ask:

qing2 jiao4 "childx" (please call childx)

If the child is actually not present at school, but they were supposed to be.. you would hear: "child x" 没在. Meaning that they did not turn up this morning.

However, if they had gone out for some unknown reason, they may be more likely to reply with 不在, since they were there in the first place, but they're not at the moment.

A bit like I think that 我不在 xue2 zhong1wen2 means that you're not studying Chinese right now, you may have done before, but you might later. Whereas, if someone said "do you study Chinese?", and you didn't (at all), you'd probably reply with 我没在 xue2 zhong1wen2, you may even add a le to mean that you've given up completely.

Is it that I'm trying to say 没在 is more final?

Ooh.. another example that I just thought of is this:

If you say "ta1不lai2" (he wont come), and "ta1没lai2", (he didn't come), this is a distinctly different meaning. This is also a good example of where mae and bu can be used in almost exactly the same way, but not quite.

[renzhe]

Mei and bu do mean different things with most verbs.

Zai is just an exception. I pitched several specially constructed sentences at a native speaker in an attempt to find the difference between buzai and meizai, and she said that they mean the same thing.

[Shi Tong]

I pitched several specially constructed sentences at a native speaker in an attempt to find the difference between buzai and meizai, and she said that they mean the same thing.

Yes, of course, I think they do essentially mean the same thing. However, if you went to an office to find someone you expected to be there, the likely reply, especially if odd, would be "mei zai" followed up with "hao3 qi2guai4". Meaning that they were exptected to be there, but turned out not to be.

buzai is just as acceptable, but there is a difference in useage IMO.

[chrix]

It's interesting, none of the grammar books I have really mention 没在, and the IME doesn't recognise it either (which is not a very reliable indicator, I know). So I think this might be a colloquial variant of 不在...