Introduction
On Monday, June 7th we launched the first two sections of our much-anticipated Grammar Guide. The Grammar Guide has been a work-in-progress for some time, and it may not be immediately apparently why this project is so big (and time consuming)! I hope today to explain a bit about what the Grammar Guide is, who is working on it, and how we hope it will help our users in their Chinese studies.
Just What the Heck is the Grammar Guide?
The Grammar Guide is a collection of articles, or “entries,” that focuses on important elements of Chinese grammar. The entries are organized by part of speech. The first two sections we launched were Adverbs and Verbs. Within these two sections there are hundreds of entries on topics such as “可 (kě)” and “Causative Verbs: 让 (ràng).” Each entry has an overview of the topic and example sentences for practice. Finally, there are links to related lessons at the bottom of many entries.
Some entries are short and to-the-point, while others are longer and branch off into other areas. Some entries feature links to related entries – this is often the case with words or structures that can be expressed in more than one way. The entry on 大约 (dàyuē), for example, is linked to the entry on 大概 (dàgài).
The Grammar Guide will continue to grow until we have published all entries. We will not be publishing individual entries one at a time, but instead will release entire sections together. We plan to start with the largest sections, and will then move on to the smaller sections. In the future you can expect to see the rest of the parts of speech covered (Nouns, Prepositions, etc.), as well as sections about Sentence Structures and constructing Comparisons, among others.
The Grammar Guide is also connected to individual ChinesePod lessons via tags. We have not tagged each and every ChinesePod lesson (over 1,400 to date)… yet! Grammar tags are essentially links to specific Grammar Guide entries (we’ve tagged about 700 lessons thus far). This means that when a lesson is tagged, you will see the tag on the left-hand sidebar. By clicking on it, you will be taken to the entry that relates to a certain grammatical element featured in that lesson. Links work both ways, too, so as I mentioned before, clicking on a related lesson link at the bottom of a Grammar Guide entry will take you to that lesson’s page where you can listen to it or do some of the exercises.
Who is Working on it?
You might be wondering how this Grammar Guide is being put together and who is working on it. Well to answer your question, this is very much a team effort! Jiaojie does a lot of the writing (1st drafts in Chinese). Jason and John then share the translating responsibilities. Jiaojie and Connie choose the example sentences and annotate them (this allows for that handy little pop-up when you mouse over a word). Jiaojie and Connie have also been linking to lessons and tagging lessons with grammar tags. The tech. team has been making sure that everything publishes and links properly, and has been a big help in connecting the lessons to the entries and vice versa.
How will this help you study?
We hope that the Grammar Guide will be a useful resource for users at all levels of Chinese study. Our entries range from newbie to more advanced. If you’re studying a lesson and you feel you need more background on a topic covered in that lesson, you can simply click on the grammar tag on the left-hand sidebar and voilà! You’re taken to an entry with an explanation, example sentences, and links to other lessons!
We’ve also been hearing from you for a long time that you find the expansion sentences to be an extremely valuable study tool. The Grammar Guide features expansion sentences in order to illustrate key points and make explanations.
Finally we hope that the topics covered in the Grammar Guide will be a starting point for more conversations about important language questions. We have created a group, called the Grammar Questions Group, and we hope that it will be a space in which users can explore issues related to Chinese grammar. Click here for more information.
As always we hope you will provide us with feedback. We encourage you to post your thoughts and suggestions here, on our website, or to email us at support@praxislanguage.com.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Sorry, my comment doesn’t have much to do with the grammar guide. I do want to take a look at it later. I want to express my agreement regarding the statement made about the expansion sentences. I do think that they are a good study tool, and they help me see new vocabulary used in context. Keep up the good work.
I would like to see a more user friendly index to this grammar guide. Entries should be sorted alphabetically (with pinyin). It would be awesome to have an index right from the grammar guide page to all the entries. Sometimes I dont know what category the word belongs to, and I don’t necessarily care to read all that stuff and have to click 2 or 3 times before I get to the index. Once there, entries are entered randomly so it’s hard to see if what I am looking for is there… OK I can use the search on page but that’s not user friendly. Most grammar books have this kind of index at the end… unless CPod’s grammar guide becomes more user friendly… I doubt that a lot of people will use it… and all that time you put into it won’t be worth it. It takes too long to find if you have an entry or not in the guide…. Please think of having a button on each lesson page, on the dashboard or on the top somewhere that would take us there directly or add grammar guide to the search drop down menu. The guide is awesome, and when it links to lessons it will be great… but its presentation is not user-friendly at all so many won’t take advantage of it.