For those of you who want to learn more about sentence-final particles in Mandarin Chinese: 🎥 COMMON Sentence-Final Particles in Chinese #1: ua-cam.com/video/Fc6zgTJ96kI/v-deo.html 🎥 COMMON Sentence-Final Particles in Chinese ＃2：ua-cam.com/video/wigN5SOIB_8/v-deo.html 🎥 Daily Sentence-Final Particles in Taiwanese Mandarin: ua-cam.com/video/jOx_NG5hnDo/v-deo.html 📝 Start mastering Chinese modal particles today and get the PDF here → gum.co/OtXAp (Traditional and Simplified characters included)
Your videos lately have been presenting more in-depth knowledge than other channels, and the information is presented in a way that is still very easy to understand for someone who hasn’t studied linguistics! These must take a lot of work to make, thank you!!
Thank you so much for the feedback! I was actually a bit worried that people would not be interested in this kind of stuff, so I really appreciate your positive feedback!
I speak Vietnamese, and upon learning Mandarin Chinese I found sentence-final particles to be very intuitive because Vietnamese uses them too. 啊 is my favorite particle because I say "à" or "ạ" (both low pitch) in Vietnamese a lot.
In English speaking Canada you commonly hear "eh" at the end of a sentence - depending on context and tone it can either imply a certainty (LOWER TONE) or ask a question (RISING TONE).
Cool!! I've always thought I heard some special sentence final particle in Canadian English. But most of my friends didn't know what I was talking about. Maybe "eh" is the one I've been hearing haha
This might just be because I'm an American & haven't been around Canadians much, but from what I see on tv or wherever, I could've sworn it was just for questions (if even that, because when I hear them speaking they don't use "eh" nearly as much as I used to think they did); then again I could be wrong.
I came up with this same hypothesis and was talking about it with my wife just a couple days ago without knowing about its formal existence already. So interesting to hear more about it and the subtleties with some tones being used on the sentence finals. I've never noticed that before! Thank you!
Korean is non-tonal but has something similar to sentence final particles, though they are not particles but actually verb endings that come at the end of the sentence (verbs in korean always come at the very end of the sentence). They are called "jong-gyeol eo-mi", or 終結語尾, and some are very similar to japanese final particles. (P.S.: it's not my native language but I speak it fluently)
Interesting. It sounds like you're just describing inflectional verb suffixes, but I'd have to know what purpose they serve in the sentence in order to determine whether their conveyed meaning is similar or not.
My native language is Italian (non-tonal language) and it does have something like sentence-final particles. However I think they're considered "interjections" in grammar books because some can also go at the beginning of a sentence, not always at the end. I can think of "neh", "eh", "deh" that can go at then end. For example, "neh" is used (only) at the end of sentences to ask for confirmation and for emphasis ("è bello, neh?" "it's nice, isn't it?").
German is also non-tonal, but I can see the use of such particles in dialects. Like "ne" saying something you expect the other person to agree to (a shortened version of "nicht?", comparable to "isn't it?"), or "ge" when asserting (telling) something. My gut tells me it's more about making sure that the sentence is understood properly. Maybe sometimes, as in Chinese, it "softens" the preceding sentence or brings an air of familiarity.
I guess English has "innit?" Or "isn't it?" or "Y'know?" for confirmation. Canadian speakers are well known for adding "eh" at the end of their sentences for similar purposes. I think English to some extent uses "mate" to change the meaning or tone. "You what mate?" - this is used (contradictingly) to add an element of hostility to a sentence. Americans add "period" to the end of sentences similar to the low tone use of "a" in Chinese. "I'm not going, period". It's an interesting linguistic thing that I'd not thought of before. Not being a very good Chinese speaker it's difficult to know if the above examples are different to the Chinese use of the words.
I don't think I'd describe that as a sentence final particle (although being a speaker of Portuguese, I know exactly what you're talking about); I'd describe it more as a filler word. But that's just me.
@@matthewheald8964aren't filler words supposed to be superfluous, meaning that if you take them out the sentence still works? If you take out "neh" from "è bello, neh?" the sentence loses its meaning of "asking for confirmation". The intonation alone isn't enough.
7:11 True for french, no particle. But just like @S R commented for Italian, there are a few 1 syllable interjections that could convey more meaning. For example "hein ?" has some similarities with the "neh ?" one they described.
Thanks for the interesting video! My mother tongue Japanese has a lot of sentence-final particles just as Chinese. It is said to be non-tonal but does have the notion of pitch like this word はし(hashi), which could either mean "bridge" or "chopstick" depending on the pitch. It's such a redundant language and that makes it hard for foreigners to sound natural.
You're welcome! I'm glad you found the video interesting. I've guessed that Japanese also uses sentence-final particles since it's a pitch-accented language. Thanks for sharing your knowledge!
I was confused by people forming questions with ne instead of ma--Now I understand what's going on there! Thank you for your thoughtful video and valuable information!
7:14 It is an interesting topic of Mandarin grammar. Spanish (my native language) does not have final particles, unlike Mandarin. Spanish is actually very reliant on intonation to differentiate Statements from Questions or from Commands/Exclamations (in addition, it is unlike English since Spanish does not rearrange verbs in yes/no questions so intonation is the only means to know what the speaker meant in those cases).
Wow, Grace, thank you so much for this video! I've been learning Mandarin for just a half a year and I always hear those sentence final particles that native Chinese people often used, but when I went to them to ask what those words are and what their meaning is, they just simply told me : because it's more beautiful this way...why not.... 'Ooh, I thought, how am I going to learn and understand this language if this is the explanation 😭' So Thank You very much again! Now I can understand better!😊❤️ Keep up the good work because you are really helpful for us, foreigners, who try to learn your beautiful language! 加油🤗
Dear Grace Thanks for the detailed information 👍 😀 In Korean language, we can add Yo (요) at the end of the verb like 감사해요(Gamsahaeyo) compared to 감사해(Gamsahae) to express some gratitude and respect to the listener. Similarly, in Tagalog of the Philippines, they use Po instead of Yo at the end like Thanks Po to represent some respect. 오늘도 고맙고 사랑해요 그레이스 티처 😉😘😉
Dear Grace, I cannot thank you enough for all your useful videos. In my language Bahasa Indonesia, we have final particles in our language, take for an example : kah (this was influenced by Japanese colonialism in Indonesia. Japanese use particle ka to ask question). We ask whether the activity has done or not yet by using final particle kah -- Sudah makan kah? Sudah mandi kah? Or for stating uncertainty -- masa dia bisa berbuat seperti itu kah 🙏
Very cool explanation of sentence-final particles! I’ve never thought of them as a form of intonation until now but it makes a lot of sense. Really interesting theory too. I know of some non-tonal languages that have question particles similar to 嗎/吗 and also some other particles that would take too long to explain lol. However, I’m thinking the theory would hold true overall and in most cases🙂Thanks for the video!
One of the most interesting things to me is how this is used in written English due to texting and social media - "lol," of course, being the prime example
I always feel like "lol" is more of a sentence final particle haha (rather than a genuine expression of "laughing out loud") Thank you for clearing up my confusion!
My mother tounge malay is not a tonal language and yet we use final sentence particles a lot. The most used one is 'la' and it acts similar like the one in Chinese (啦）
Thanks for the helpful video! My native language is Dutch. Our speech is generally quite flat and we don’t have tones, however we do have sentence final particles. I’m sure about at least one: “hoor” (pronounce as “wh0re”, which English speakers who learn tend to find quite funny haha) It’s used if you accept a situation without much enthusiasm, or if you want to convey that something isn’t a big deal. E.g.: Kan ik jouw pen lenen? (Can I borrow your pen?) Ja, hoor (yeah sure) “Hoor” would tell the listener that’s no big deal, or the speaker doesn’t care.
In karbi language we also have a final particle so we change our final particle in expression since our language is tonal also our language have prefix to indicate the tone change .
Thanks for this video! It helped me understand those sentence-final particles in Mandarin Chinese :) As for your question in the end, I think Japanese, which is non-tonal, does have sentence-final particles like "ka", "ne", and "yo". :)
In informal speech in Russian (non-tonal) we use "а" as sentence-final particle in questions to make question more intense (that way speaker shows that they're almost confused), e. g. "Ну что же ты делаешь, а?"
I feel like a bunch of information just got unlocked/clicked. So easy to understand too. Thank you!! I didn’t actively notice ‘a’ went low in questions.. it sounds like a question sound to me still🤓 cool haha. I did pronounce it low tho. It’s cool.
In Dutch we have one sentence final particle ("Hè)', even though it's not a tonal language. But it is used to convey something that we can't convey through intonation
I am Trinidad and Tobago, I've been trying to figure out if we have particles in our version of English or not. Like "ent", "awah", "oui"(kinda old fashioned), "yes", "eh", "nah" I think they they're similar to particles, as in they don't really have any specific meaning, but flavours the sentence in a way that changes the attitude and function of the sentence. As it is basically English, it's not tonal, but maybe because of the way we do intonation we have them, because we tend to kind of go up and down a lot more than other English speakers do. Me don't know nah 😂
In English, we use "eh" in some dialects. Such as "This is pretty delicious, eh?" It's used as a final particle just like Chinese. But it's only used as a question.
🙏 非常感謝你的精彩課，eh. ❤ its so helpful to learn this. you have a great teaching style. Thanx Gordon. Yes, that is our Cndn 🇨🇦 signature. it translates as 嗯 (ń) and could be hmm, mmm, hum, um etc lol
this video was very interesting!!!! about the final part: afaik Japanese and Korean have something akin to "sentence-final particles" but they aren't tonal
I'm Mexican and... In Spanish we don't have sentence ending particles. The closest we got is expressions that are put at the end to express our selfs better. I been studying Japanese for 1 year and there's multiple particles although it's not tonal.
Thanks so much for the fantastic content! For your question: my native language, Finnish, fits in with your hypothesis in an interesting way. The language is not tonal, but also, many speak it with little intonation (as my English-speaking friends pointed out to me when moving to an English-speaking country, since I spoke English the same flat way). Having thought about it at the time I concluded that Finns rely on intonation using time (this is something that the English-speaking folks would pick up when they hear Finnish). I mean that we slow speech down for emphasis, to indicate uncertainty, sarcasm, or some other subtlety (of course, this also exists to lesser extent in e.g. English). What about sentence-final particles then? (I'm not a linguist so my terminology may be inaccurate) Overall, the language expresses a lot of things by modulating the endings of base words, instead of "short words between words". This includes an extensive grammatical case system, but also tonal particles (or the word might be "clitic"). When we're asking a question, we add something to the end of a word (not the whole sentence) to indicate that it's a question. For example, "katsotaan" would mean "let's watch", or "let's see", while "katsotaanko" would mean "shall we watch?".
I have observed that in both Mandarin and Cantonese the last word of a sentence regularly gives up its tone and instead carries the sentence intonation.
Excellent explanations! I had a real brain-plosion. Regarding other languages and sentence final particles. My hunch is every language does have them or something basically the same BUT only character (and/or syllabary-based languages) will actually have a formal notation for them. Japanese, Korean, etc... seem to. English DOES have them but outside maybe comic books I don't think I've ever seen or paid attention to them. And they might not count as I guess they're often elongations of the last word of a sentence. (I haven't studied language or linguistics in anyway so this is all just stuff I think I know not stuff I actually know and am more than happy to be corrected).
Very interesting & important. Also,!others say that Chinese has another intonation pattern- to raise (& lower ?) whole clause,?sentence, & phrase? average pitch levels- example, people raise average pitch level when asking questions. Do people do BOTH at same time??
Latin has particles... and hence most romance languages will also. It is not that they are contradictory but that Chinese emphasize that feature(of tone) then one has to have some way to write "intonation". That is, tone is really just very specific intonation(after all, it's all just frequencies at the end of the day). It does not have the extended grammatical structure to remove ambiguity like romance languages do so it uses particles to deal with it. In fact, all languages have such things because it is part of the being alive. We make different sounds based on our different states. Rising has always and will always be associated with excitement, fear, etc. This is because those tones occur in such experiences that we do not even need to know a language to experience them. Animals also make such sounds. So no doubt we find such things in our language(all of them). All languages evolve and as such primitive sounds were convert in to more sophisticated(humans have a thing with the game king of the hill)/refined speech patterns these different ways to handle expressing the various motives of the speaker where integrated in to the language. A best I can tell currently is that tonal languages "opted" to go with being more specific. Chinese also essentially gives everything a unique name and sound. This is pretty cool as it is being the most specific... but just like the uncertainty principle too much of one thing can be bad. Because Chinese essentially labels everything with a sound and symbol without some specific unambiguous logic this makes the language extremely difficult to learn since it is done by pure memorization. Luckily Chinese is not completely illogical as it does have a system and it's various type characters which does give a system. What I worry about with the Chinese language is that it requires, for the most part, memorization of all the characters used for it to sustain itself. Characters that are not regularly used will be forgotten... by individuals and the masses. That lazy Chinese people will not memorize all the characters and so over time the Chinese language will actually die out(I know this is unlikely to go to zero since there are so many Chinese but many Chinese characters will eventually die out as many already have. New ones will be created but I think the Chinese people will actually modify their language to be more romance like with more generalized characters(grammar characters). As more characters are forgotten more will be forgotten. After all, this is why Chinese writing was simplified in the first place. A language that relies on it's people memorizing and regularly using symbols for those symbols to remain is doomed(this does not mean Chinese will actually die out but simply that it will more in to something else just like languages in the past have done. E.g., think of Latin vs English. Chinese is like Latin as "NeoChinese" is to English. In some sense English is a bastardization of Latin although maybe it's more appropriate to say Italian is). Other languages do not have this problem since most have some system(although a tangled one) that enables one to get a good educated guess at the meaning. This is true in Chinese too but it's much more ambiguous. Alternatively if China was to become the dominant power in the world(and it looks like that may be likely) then the language could spread significantly over the next few decades. Depending on how things go, if the world goes up in smoke but the Chinese rulers become dominant then it may be that Chinese becomes a language only for the ruling class(this is effectively what happened to Latin). Anyways, the point is that we all say and do the same things in any language and Chinese is no different, it just does it slightly different than everyone else. It is what makes languages cool.
4:44: I'm confused by the tone of wan 碗 in "他一個人能吃五碗了." Was there a reason it was pronounced with fourth tone rather than third tone? Or am I mishearing it? Sentence final particles are fun to use in order to express emotions in more nuanced ways. Or, just put A 啊 at the end of everything you say to push people to agree with you 😄 For languages I understand besides Chinese: Taiwanese: tonal & sentence final particle English: non-tonal, no sentence final particle Spanish: non-tonal, no sentence final particle
I hear it it too -- 五碗呢 and also 好美啊 at 5:46 sound like 2-4-low. I wonder if it has something to do with two 3rd tones in a row followed by a low sentence ending particle or if it is particular to certain dialects (I didn't see anything with these words having alternative pronunciations
Russian does have some sentence ending particles (же, ли, ка) without being a tonal language. Its stress used to be pitch-based in the past though (now it isn't).
Addendum: they don't necessarily have to be at the end of a sentence, example: Хочешь **ли** ты кушать? Also sometimes those particles are part of the word, like in неужели (не-у-же-ли), which literally is made up of nothing but some sort of particles.
In indonesia, some informal speaking like : kamu mau makan? OR makan? (In higher pitch at the end) and saya mau makan. OR makan. (In lower pitch). The high and low pitch determind question or answer.
It might be interesting to see if other languages that have more tones than Mandarin (e.g. Vietnamese, Cantonese, etc.) have more sentence final particles. If there's any speakers of one of those languages (ones with 5+ tones) who may also speak Mandarin, let me know if you guys think you use more particles than they do.
We do though? "ну что же это такое то а?" every particle in this sentence adds modal meaning. you can translate this sentence as "what is this" but without taking the modal particles it loses all communicative meaning of affront, surprise and scolding.
Tone and intonation are really phonological concepts. But the sentence finals are semantically markers that English expresses also with modals, or mood indicating words. You're unlikely to get a good analogy between English and Mandarin as there's quite a bit going on at several different levels. Back in the 1990s sentence final particles other than 嗎 and 了 weren't even taught to most foreign learners of Mandarin. I'd say, a good pedagogical model hasn't yet evolved. Regional differences apparently exist as to who prefers to add emphasis or clarity with sentence final particles. I really enjoy your willingness to present linguistic background. Over 30 years I've read just about everything published in English about Chinese grammar. I find you are teaching new information I've not seen in print.
On that same topic I've always wondered how singing works. If the melody goes up but the word you're singing at that point is 4th tone then what. It somehow works but I don't understand why. I'm a banana person.
This video is to talk about the general idea of sentence-final particles. If you'd like to learn the use of sentence-final particles in Chinese, here are the resources: 🎥 COMMON Sentence-Final Particles in Chinese #1: ua-cam.com/video/Fc6zgTJ96kI/v-deo.html (This one includes "ba") 🎥 COMMON Sentence-Final Particles in Chinese ＃2：ua-cam.com/video/wigN5SOIB_8/v-deo.html 🎥 Daily Sentence-Final Particles in Taiwanese Mandarin: ua-cam.com/video/jOx_NG5hnDo/v-deo.html 📝 Start mastering Chinese modal particles today and get the PDF here → gum.co/OtXAp (Traditional and Simplified characters included)
Actually those are both correct questions. The first question above shows surprise at information already given, and asks for confirmation. The second question just asks for information.
"He is a teacher?" is only used to reply to a previous statement that says or implies that he is a teacher. It is an error (or slang) to use it in some other situation. In most situations, you must change word order ("Is he a teacher?")
For those of you who want to learn more about sentence-final particles in Mandarin Chinese:
🎥 COMMON Sentence-Final Particles in Chinese #1: ua-cam.com/video/Fc6zgTJ96kI/v-deo.html
🎥 COMMON Sentence-Final Particles in Chinese ＃2：ua-cam.com/video/wigN5SOIB_8/v-deo.html
🎥 Daily Sentence-Final Particles in Taiwanese Mandarin: ua-cam.com/video/jOx_NG5hnDo/v-deo.html
📝 Start mastering Chinese modal particles today and get the PDF here → gum.co/OtXAp
(Traditional and Simplified characters included)
Can you share for me chinese alphabet
I love your teaching Thanks so much teacher cute in the world ❤❤❤
1:40 1:40
Your videos lately have been presenting more in-depth knowledge than other channels, and the information is presented in a way that is still very easy to understand for someone who hasn’t studied linguistics! These must take a lot of work to make, thank you!!
Thank you so much for the feedback! I was actually a bit worried that people would not be interested in this kind of stuff, so I really appreciate your positive feedback!
@@GraceMandarinChinese I'm a linguistic nerd, so I may be biased, but I love all of it. Keep it up!
I speak Vietnamese, and upon learning Mandarin Chinese I found sentence-final particles to be very intuitive because Vietnamese uses them too. 啊 is my favorite particle because I say "à" or "ạ" (both low pitch) in Vietnamese a lot.
In English speaking Canada you commonly hear "eh" at the end of a sentence - depending on context and tone it can either imply a certainty (LOWER TONE) or ask a question (RISING TONE).
Canadian: "Wow, Grace is incredibly smart, eh?"
Cool!! I've always thought I heard some special sentence final particle in Canadian English. But most of my friends didn't know what I was talking about. Maybe "eh" is the one I've been hearing haha
@@Tongdrol I like this example 😎
@@GraceMandarinChinese 🧡
This might just be because I'm an American & haven't been around Canadians much, but from what I see on tv or wherever, I could've sworn it was just for questions (if even that, because when I hear them speaking they don't use "eh" nearly as much as I used to think they did); then again I could be wrong.
I came up with this same hypothesis and was talking about it with my wife just a couple days ago without knowing about its formal existence already. So interesting to hear more about it and the subtleties with some tones being used on the sentence finals. I've never noticed that before! Thank you!
Korean is non-tonal but has something similar to sentence final particles, though they are not particles but actually verb endings that come at the end of the sentence (verbs in korean always come at the very end of the sentence). They are called "jong-gyeol eo-mi", or 終結語尾, and some are very similar to japanese final particles.
(P.S.: it's not my native language but I speak it fluently)
Interesting. It sounds like you're just describing inflectional verb suffixes, but I'd have to know what purpose they serve in the sentence in order to determine whether their conveyed meaning is similar or not.
My native language is Italian (non-tonal language) and it does have something like sentence-final particles. However I think they're considered "interjections" in grammar books because some can also go at the beginning of a sentence, not always at the end. I can think of "neh", "eh", "deh" that can go at then end. For example, "neh" is used (only) at the end of sentences to ask for confirmation and for emphasis ("è bello, neh?" "it's nice, isn't it?").
German is also non-tonal, but I can see the use of such particles in dialects. Like "ne" saying something you expect the other person to agree to (a shortened version of "nicht?", comparable to "isn't it?"), or "ge" when asserting (telling) something. My gut tells me it's more about making sure that the sentence is understood properly. Maybe sometimes, as in Chinese, it "softens" the preceding sentence or brings an air of familiarity.
I guess English has "innit?" Or "isn't it?" or "Y'know?" for confirmation. Canadian speakers are well known for adding "eh" at the end of their sentences for similar purposes. I think English to some extent uses "mate" to change the meaning or tone. "You what mate?" - this is used (contradictingly) to add an element of hostility to a sentence. Americans add "period" to the end of sentences similar to the low tone use of "a" in Chinese. "I'm not going, period". It's an interesting linguistic thing that I'd not thought of before. Not being a very good Chinese speaker it's difficult to know if the above examples are different to the Chinese use of the words.
oh! we also have “né” in brazilian portuguese with the same use!
I don't think I'd describe that as a sentence final particle (although being a speaker of Portuguese, I know exactly what you're talking about); I'd describe it more as a filler word. But that's just me.
@@matthewheald8964aren't filler words supposed to be superfluous, meaning that if you take them out the sentence still works? If you take out "neh" from "è bello, neh?" the sentence loses its meaning of "asking for confirmation". The intonation alone isn't enough.
7:11 True for french, no particle.
But just like @S R commented for Italian, there are a few 1 syllable interjections that could convey more meaning.
For example "hein ?" has some similarities with the "neh ?" one they described.
Thanks for the interesting video! My mother tongue Japanese has a lot of sentence-final particles just as Chinese. It is said to be non-tonal but does have the notion of pitch like this word はし(hashi), which could either mean "bridge" or "chopstick" depending on the pitch. It's such a redundant language and that makes it hard for foreigners to sound natural.
You're welcome! I'm glad you found the video interesting. I've guessed that Japanese also uses sentence-final particles since it's a pitch-accented language. Thanks for sharing your knowledge!
I was confused by people forming questions with ne instead of ma--Now I understand what's going on there! Thank you for your thoughtful video and valuable information!
7:14 It is an interesting topic of Mandarin grammar. Spanish (my native language) does not have final particles, unlike Mandarin. Spanish is actually very reliant on intonation to differentiate Statements from Questions or from Commands/Exclamations (in addition, it is unlike English since Spanish does not rearrange verbs in yes/no questions so intonation is the only means to know what the speaker meant in those cases).
Wow, Grace, thank you so much for this video! I've been learning Mandarin for just a half a year and I always hear those sentence final particles that native Chinese people often used, but when I went to them to ask what those words are and what their meaning is, they just simply told me : because it's more beautiful this way...why not.... 'Ooh, I thought, how am I going to learn and understand this language if this is the explanation 😭'
So Thank You very much again! Now I can understand better!😊❤️
Keep up the good work because you are really helpful for us, foreigners, who try to learn your beautiful language! 加油🤗
I've wanted to know this for so long!!! Thank you!!
多谢
your videos are amazing. They help me so much with learning chinese! I am a native german speaker and in my language we don't really have intonations
can when you write Chinese sentences you also write Bo po mo fo above the writing, like your previous video, it really helps us learn
有用极了！多谢您！
Dear Grace
Thanks for the detailed information 👍 😀 In Korean language, we can add Yo (요) at the end of the verb like 감사해요(Gamsahaeyo) compared to 감사해(Gamsahae) to express some gratitude and respect to the listener. Similarly, in Tagalog of the Philippines, they use Po instead of Yo at the end like Thanks Po to represent some respect. 오늘도 고맙고 사랑해요 그레이스 티처 😉😘😉
Cool! Thanks for sharing your knowledge!
Dear Grace, I cannot thank you enough for all your useful videos. In my language Bahasa Indonesia, we have final particles in our language, take for an example : kah (this was influenced by Japanese colonialism in Indonesia. Japanese use particle ka to ask question). We ask whether the activity has done or not yet by using final particle kah -- Sudah makan kah? Sudah mandi kah? Or for stating uncertainty -- masa dia bisa berbuat seperti itu kah 🙏
sumber nya? kyknyalu ngaco deh
Very cool explanation of sentence-final particles! I’ve never thought of them as a form of intonation until now but it makes a lot of sense. Really interesting theory too. I know of some non-tonal languages that have question particles similar to 嗎/吗 and also some other particles that would take too long to explain lol. However, I’m thinking the theory would hold true overall and in most cases🙂Thanks for the video!
One of the most interesting things to me is how this is used in written English due to texting and social media - "lol," of course, being the prime example
I always feel like "lol" is more of a sentence final particle haha (rather than a genuine expression of "laughing out loud") Thank you for clearing up my confusion!
@@GraceMandarinChinese Absolutely haha
And haha too lol
😂
My mother tounge malay is not a tonal language and yet we use final sentence particles a lot. The most used one is 'la' and it acts similar like the one in Chinese (啦）
I'm wondering if those particles were actually borrowed from Chinese? (I'm just guessing)
@@GraceMandarinChinese Yup most of the Malay/SG final particles used do come from Cantonese/Hokkien origin
Thanks for the helpful video!
My native language is Dutch. Our speech is generally quite flat and we don’t have tones, however we do have sentence final particles. I’m sure about at least one: “hoor” (pronounce as “wh0re”, which English speakers who learn tend to find quite funny haha)
It’s used if you accept a situation without much enthusiasm, or if you want to convey that something isn’t a big deal. E.g.:
Kan ik jouw pen lenen? (Can I borrow your pen?)
Ja, hoor (yeah sure)
“Hoor” would tell the listener that’s no big deal, or the speaker doesn’t care.
In karbi language we also have a final particle so we change our final particle in expression since our language is tonal also our language have prefix to indicate the tone change .
Grace，你马上就要到20万个人的subscribers了!
耶（yeah）🥳 好期待！
Thanks for this video! It helped me understand those sentence-final particles in Mandarin Chinese :) As for your question in the end, I think Japanese, which is non-tonal, does have sentence-final particles like "ka", "ne", and "yo". :)
This video explained some things I didn’t know, 多谢
In informal speech in Russian (non-tonal) we use "а" as sentence-final particle in questions to make question more intense (that way speaker shows that they're almost confused), e. g. "Ну что же ты делаешь, а?"
I feel like a bunch of information just got unlocked/clicked. So easy to understand too. Thank you!!
I didn’t actively notice ‘a’ went low in questions.. it sounds like a question sound to me still🤓 cool haha. I did pronounce it low tho. It’s cool.
In Dutch we have one sentence final particle ("Hè)', even though it's not a tonal language. But it is used to convey something that we can't convey through intonation
I am Trinidad and Tobago, I've been trying to figure out if we have particles in our version of English or not. Like "ent", "awah", "oui"(kinda old fashioned), "yes", "eh", "nah"
I think they they're similar to particles, as in they don't really have any specific meaning, but flavours the sentence in a way that changes the attitude and function of the sentence.
As it is basically English, it's not tonal, but maybe because of the way we do intonation we have them, because we tend to kind of go up and down a lot more than other English speakers do.
Me don't know nah 😂
terrific explanation!
In English, we use "eh" in some dialects. Such as "This is pretty delicious, eh?" It's used as a final particle just like Chinese. But it's only used as a question.
🙏 非常感謝你的精彩課，eh. ❤ its so helpful to learn this. you have a great teaching style. Thanx Gordon. Yes, that is our Cndn 🇨🇦 signature. it translates as 嗯 (ń) and could be hmm, mmm, hum, um etc lol
this video was very interesting!!!! about the final part: afaik Japanese and Korean have something akin to "sentence-final particles" but they aren't tonal
I'm Mexican and...
In Spanish we don't have sentence ending particles.
The closest we got is expressions that are put at the end to express our selfs better. I been studying Japanese for 1 year and there's multiple particles although it's not tonal.
The queen has returned let us celebrate
ur work is so cool I hope you do more linguistics videos!
Omg without you I would know like 60% leas chinese, thank you❤
❤❤❤
Thanks so much for the fantastic content!
For your question: my native language, Finnish, fits in with your hypothesis in an interesting way. The language is not tonal, but also, many speak it with little intonation (as my English-speaking friends pointed out to me when moving to an English-speaking country, since I spoke English the same flat way). Having thought about it at the time I concluded that Finns rely on intonation using time (this is something that the English-speaking folks would pick up when they hear Finnish). I mean that we slow speech down for emphasis, to indicate uncertainty, sarcasm, or some other subtlety (of course, this also exists to lesser extent in e.g. English).
What about sentence-final particles then? (I'm not a linguist so my terminology may be inaccurate) Overall, the language expresses a lot of things by modulating the endings of base words, instead of "short words between words". This includes an extensive grammatical case system, but also tonal particles (or the word might be "clitic"). When we're asking a question, we add something to the end of a word (not the whole sentence) to indicate that it's a question. For example, "katsotaan" would mean "let's watch", or "let's see", while "katsotaanko" would mean "shall we watch?".
I have observed that in both Mandarin and Cantonese the last word of a sentence regularly gives up its tone and instead carries the sentence intonation.
每天跟着grace学一点英语( ﹡ˆoˆ﹡ )
It does hold true for Portuguese.
Excellent explanations! I had a real brain-plosion.
Regarding other languages and sentence final particles. My hunch is every language does have them or something basically the same BUT only character (and/or syllabary-based languages) will actually have a formal notation for them. Japanese, Korean, etc... seem to. English DOES have them but outside maybe comic books I don't think I've ever seen or paid attention to them. And they might not count as I guess they're often elongations of the last word of a sentence. (I haven't studied language or linguistics in anyway so this is all just stuff I think I know not stuff I actually know and am more than happy to be corrected).
Very interesting & important.
Also,!others say that Chinese has another intonation pattern- to raise (& lower ?) whole clause,?sentence, & phrase? average pitch levels- example, people raise average pitch level when asking questions. Do people do
BOTH at same time??
Latin has particles... and hence most romance languages will also. It is not that they are contradictory but that Chinese emphasize that feature(of tone) then one has to have some way to write "intonation". That is, tone is really just very specific intonation(after all, it's all just frequencies at the end of the day). It does not have the extended grammatical structure to remove ambiguity like romance languages do so it uses particles to deal with it. In fact, all languages have such things because it is part of the being alive. We make different sounds based on our different states. Rising has always and will always be associated with excitement, fear, etc. This is because those tones occur in such experiences that we do not even need to know a language to experience them. Animals also make such sounds. So no doubt we find such things in our language(all of them).
All languages evolve and as such primitive sounds were convert in to more sophisticated(humans have a thing with the game king of the hill)/refined speech patterns these different ways to handle expressing the various motives of the speaker where integrated in to the language. A best I can tell currently is that tonal languages "opted" to go with being more specific. Chinese also essentially gives everything a unique name and sound. This is pretty cool as it is being the most specific... but just like the uncertainty principle too much of one thing can be bad. Because Chinese essentially labels everything with a sound and symbol without some specific unambiguous logic this makes the language extremely difficult to learn since it is done by pure memorization. Luckily Chinese is not completely illogical as it does have a system and it's various type characters which does give a system.
What I worry about with the Chinese language is that it requires, for the most part, memorization of all the characters used for it to sustain itself. Characters that are not regularly used will be forgotten... by individuals and the masses. That lazy Chinese people will not memorize all the characters and so over time the Chinese language will actually die out(I know this is unlikely to go to zero since there are so many Chinese but many Chinese characters will eventually die out as many already have. New ones will be created but I think the Chinese people will actually modify their language to be more romance like with more generalized characters(grammar characters). As more characters are forgotten more will be forgotten. After all, this is why Chinese writing was simplified in the first place. A language that relies on it's people memorizing and regularly using symbols for those symbols to remain is doomed(this does not mean Chinese will actually die out but simply that it will more in to something else just like languages in the past have done. E.g., think of Latin vs English. Chinese is like Latin as "NeoChinese" is to English. In some sense English is a bastardization of Latin although maybe it's more appropriate to say Italian is).
Other languages do not have this problem since most have some system(although a tangled one) that enables one to get a good educated guess at the meaning. This is true in Chinese too but it's much more ambiguous. Alternatively if China was to become the dominant power in the world(and it looks like that may be likely) then the language could spread significantly over the next few decades. Depending on how things go, if the world goes up in smoke but the Chinese rulers become dominant then it may be that Chinese becomes a language only for the ruling class(this is effectively what happened to Latin).
Anyways, the point is that we all say and do the same things in any language and Chinese is no different, it just does it slightly different than everyone else. It is what makes languages cool.
4:44: I'm confused by the tone of wan 碗 in "他一個人能吃五碗了." Was there a reason it was pronounced with fourth tone rather than third tone? Or am I mishearing it?
Sentence final particles are fun to use in order to express emotions in more nuanced ways. Or, just put A 啊 at the end of everything you say to push people to agree with you 😄
For languages I understand besides Chinese:
Taiwanese: tonal & sentence final particle
English: non-tonal, no sentence final particle
Spanish: non-tonal, no sentence final particle
I hear it it too -- 五碗呢 and also 好美啊 at 5:46 sound like 2-4-low. I wonder if it has something to do with two 3rd tones in a row followed by a low sentence ending particle or if it is particular to certain dialects (I didn't see anything with these words having alternative pronunciations
Hello Grace, can you do a video about how to use 除了…以外 please?
Grace氣質正妹😍.開學加油💪
我會加油 💪
OMG I just realized 吗 and 嘛 are spoken with different intonations?! Whaaaat 🤦🏼🤯🤯
🤯🤯🤯
បង្រៀនល្អណាស់❤
Russian does have some sentence ending particles (же, ли, ка) without being a tonal language. Its stress used to be pitch-based in the past though (now it isn't).
Addendum: they don't necessarily have to be at the end of a sentence, example:
Хочешь **ли** ты кушать?
Also sometimes those particles are part of the word, like in неужели (не-у-же-ли), which literally is made up of nothing but some sort of particles.
In indonesia, some informal speaking like : kamu mau makan? OR makan? (In higher pitch at the end) and saya mau makan. OR makan. (In lower pitch).
The high and low pitch determind question or answer.
This was a very informative video, thanks a lot!
French is probably le least tonal language and it does not uses them :)
It might be interesting to see if other languages that have more tones than Mandarin (e.g. Vietnamese, Cantonese, etc.) have more sentence final particles. If there's any speakers of one of those languages (ones with 5+ tones) who may also speak Mandarin, let me know if you guys think you use more particles than they do.
Native Russian here. We don't have this kind of particals in our language, we use intonation.
我认为你的理论是真的
We do though? "ну что же это такое то а?" every particle in this sentence adds modal meaning. you can translate this sentence as "what is this" but without taking the modal particles it loses all communicative meaning of affront, surprise and scolding.
How do you know which final particle to use?
Tone and intonation are really phonological concepts.
But the sentence finals are semantically markers that English expresses also with modals, or mood indicating words.
You're unlikely to get a good analogy between English and Mandarin as there's quite a bit going on at several different levels.
Back in the 1990s sentence final particles other than 嗎 and 了 weren't even taught to most foreign learners of Mandarin.
I'd say, a good pedagogical model hasn't yet evolved.
Regional differences apparently exist as to who prefers to add emphasis or clarity with sentence final particles.
I really enjoy your willingness to present linguistic background. Over 30 years I've read just about everything published in English about Chinese grammar. I find you are teaching new information I've not seen in print.
to soften the tones?
I love you!
4:45 is it me or she says "wǔ wàn" instead of "wú wǎn"
For spectacular English sentence-final intonation-eeeehhh, please look up Matt Berry 🤣
In Canada we very often add "eh" to a sentence. " It cold, eh"/ Its crazy, eh" /How are you doing, eh.
母语者表示学到了😮
On that same topic I've always wondered how singing works. If the melody goes up but the word you're singing at that point is 4th tone then what. It somehow works but I don't understand why.
I'm a banana person.
I talked about it in this video: ua-cam.com/video/VbfqPVjzX7E/v-deo.html ☺️
@@GraceMandarinChinese thanks! I only found your channel yesterday :)
lou shi, Xie xie ni 😊
VIRGO POWER A!!!!
No sentence final particles in English, eh?
長知識了XD
wait! doesn’t 恩 mean Grace
You didn’t give any examples about ba!
This video is to talk about the general idea of sentence-final particles. If you'd like to learn the use of sentence-final particles in Chinese, here are the resources:
🎥 COMMON Sentence-Final Particles in Chinese #1: ua-cam.com/video/Fc6zgTJ96kI/v-deo.html (This one includes "ba")
🎥 COMMON Sentence-Final Particles in Chinese ＃2：ua-cam.com/video/wigN5SOIB_8/v-deo.html
🎥 Daily Sentence-Final Particles in Taiwanese Mandarin: ua-cam.com/video/jOx_NG5hnDo/v-deo.html
📝 Start mastering Chinese modal particles today and get the PDF here → gum.co/OtXAp
(Traditional and Simplified characters included)
3:05 remember that in English you change the sentence structure in questions. So no "he is a teacher?", but - > Is he a teacher.
Yes! I was trying to show that you can frame a statement as a question just by using intonation, but thank you for the reminder!
Actually those are both correct questions. The first question above shows surprise at information already given, and asks for confirmation. The second question just asks for information.
"He is a teacher?" is only used to reply to a previous statement that says or implies that he is a teacher. It is an error (or slang) to use it in some other situation. In most situations, you must change word order ("Is he a teacher?")
MY WIFE..... MAMI.... SAYANG KU..
. MAHATMA ERWIN DULMIN GANDHIJI.... MAHATMA ERWIN DULMIN GANDHIJI.....
回家作業,請用啊吧呢造句！！ 解答:啊呢吧吧....
哈哈哈哈哈我要笑死 我看了什麼東西....
ur work is so cool I hope you do more linguistics videos!
MY WIFE...... MAMI.... SAYANG KU.... MAHATMA ERWIN DULMIN GANDHIJI.... MAHATMA ERWIN DULMIN GANDHIJI....