Unit 2: Practice Conjunctive Particles

Learning Objectives

Building on the "Learn" Unit, in this section, we will practice the grammatical forms and functions of the two conjunctive particles/adverbs 就 vs 才. You will see five-parts of a narrated PPT that give you examples and quick practices, all based on natural language either as used by native speakers of Chinese or by students learning Chinese (for error correction exercises). 

You will see sentence-level translation exercises, word-choice exercises, and discourse-level listening and reading and understanding, based on film clips and monologues. 

The specific goals are to: 

• understand the meaning and typical grammar patterns of 就 vs. 才 at the intermediate level;

• develop advanced proficiency by understanding authentic examples of 就 vs. 才 in expressing conditions, circumstances, time-frames, sequenced events, subjective stances, attitudes and assertions;

• learn formulaic expressions;

• gain knowledge of the Chinese people and society by understanding the cultural context of certain language examples. 

Part 1: Conjunctive Particles 

Part 2: Conjunctive Particles

Part 3: Conjunctive Particles 

Part 4: Conjunctive Particles 

Part 5: Conjunctive Particles 

Instructional PPTs

Data Sources

• The majority of the sentence-level examples are selected from Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese and CCL-PKU (Beijing University, Department of Chinese Linguistics, Beijing, China). 

• The Pear Story is from the online database created by Dr. Mary S. Erbaugh at http://www.pearstories.org/

• 大山‘s weibo can be found at: http://www.weibo.com/dashan

• You can find the video clips used in this presentation at these Youtube links: 

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg6uFCS9HK0 (李嘉诚一分钟自我介绍） 

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKrTfrtY4Eg (女人当家-风水好家） 

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSrNeGbcFXQ (麦兜故事） 

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HYvhGIRy4w （夏日协奏曲）