Book review: Basic Patterns of Chinese Grammar

If you’d like to blot out the concept of fun summertime reading, then join the Saipan Tribune readers who are studying Chinese these days. Light reading, it ain’t: textbooks, books on writing the characters, books on reading the characters, books that ignore the characters and focus on speaking, books that don’t ignore the characters and focus on speaking, books on vocabulary, and finally the most tormenting of all categories, books on grammar.

Grammar. Ugh. Well, I’ve finally found a ray of sunshine. It’s a skinny little book titled Basic Patterns of Chinese Grammar, and it hit the scene this year.

It’s just 127 pages including the index. But this is no superficial treatment of the grammar. The scope of the book goes beyond the three college semesters I’ve taken. So how can such a little book carry so much weight?

Well, I’ll first consider what the conventional approach looks like, surveying it with my gimlet eye of cynicism, and then I’ll note why Basic Patterns of Chinese Grammar is so useful.

In any language I’ve seen, including English, most grammar books are as overbearing as possible. It’s all rules and linguistic jargon. I guess they’re striking for stature as “authoritative.” Teaching you how to actually say something isn’t the goal. After all, grammar is rules, not tactics. So the conventional product, belched out by institutions and publishers in industrial quantities, is tomes of authoritative discourse; big, gray, weighty. The material is perfectly correct, I suppose. But it’s often totally useless.

Ever panned for gold in a muddy river? That’s how grammar strikes me. I slosh through endless buckets of mud, hoping to find a speck of something shiny that actually has some real-world value.

During my last foray into Chinese grammar I actually kept track of my time. I was neck deep in the big muddy for 210 hours. Looking back on it I figure I retained maybe 10 hours worth of usable material. My peers have reported generally similar results. So our mud-to-nuggets ratio was mighty bad.

Well, that’s the problem. Fortunately, Basic Patterns of Chinese Grammar looks like a solution. Authors Qin Xue Herzberg and Larry Herzberg, both professors of Chinese, don’t get bogged down in the big muddy. Instead of forcing the reader to pan for gold, the writers did it for us. They sifted through all the mush, pulled out the best nuggets, polished them with well-chosen examples, and dropped them (plink!) into an easy-to-read format.

But easy-to-read doesn’t mean fluffy. I noticed that the authors don’t avoid the troublesome topics, but, instead, they focused on them. For students of Chinese, I’ll note that the hydra-headed “le” particle is plainly sorted out here (Chapter 6). The triple-whammy “de” particle gets succinctly covered in Chapter 7. And the un-lovable realm of resultative verb endings gets neatly nailed down with several pages of examples (Chapter 10).

The last of the 13 chapters is a two-page summary of salutations and such used for letter-writing. That’s a nice touch. But it’s just a touch, and the reverse side of the second page is vacant. If I was to make a suggestion for a future edition I’d suggest filling that blank slate with more tips for business letters.

Which leads me to some market context, since students, not business types, are the primary market for the book. It is clearly destined for success with students because it is, well, so successful at being clear.

But I think anyone studying the language, even informally, or on their own, or whatever, will also find this book useful. However, a lot of people will probably have to slog through a few hundred of hours of frustrating effort before they can truly appreciate the merits of succinct summarization.

And along those lines, what I want is a book on grammar that summarizes everything I need, and nothing I don’t need. That’s probably an impossible goal, but Basic Patterns of Chinese Grammar comes close enough for me. So I’ve put away my weighty texts, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to enjoy some of my summer now.

[I](Basic Patterns of Chinese Grammar, 127 pages, published by Stone Bridge Press, authored by Qin Xue Herzberg and Larry Herzberg, $12.95.)
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