Reddit mentions of Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar (Routledge Comprehensive Grammars)

ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS OP?

Hi everyone. I'm the red person in this post. I absolutely love how the OP here decided to include this one comment out of context and failed to include the fact that I'm a motherfucking linguist.

The book I'm using to learn grammar is called Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar by Yip Po-Ching and Don Rimmington. This book is what's called a "reference grammar." It is not, in fact, a textbook, it is a book aimed at linguists to be able to understand grammatical concepts of other languages in extreme detail.

How extreme, you may ask? There's an entire chapter dedicated to a single verb. It's not really intended to be used as a textbook at all. Every chapter consists one to two paragraph descriptions of an aspect of the language, followed by a handful of examples.

This type of book isn't particularly accessible to the average person because it's very dense with technical terminology, and it goes into way more detail than a beginner needs. As I go through it, I'm skipping massive chunks because I know how to identify what's not important to learn right now and can skip it. There's probably a decent chunk of the population that can't remember what an adverb is from when they learned it in high school, so I don't think a chapter section entitled "Initiator-Oriented or Action-Oriented Descriptive Adverbials" will be of much use to them.

The book I'm using for pronunciation is called The Phonology of Standard Chinese by San Duanmu. Do you know how detailed this book is? They don't even start talking about tone until page 255! Tone is a pretty important beginner concept in Chinese, though, don't ya think? But my specialization in linguistics is phonetics/phonology, so I love reading about the detailed little aspects of how the sound system works.

Hey OP, this sub is for posting high schoolers who took a basic physics course and post statuses about how they've been thinking about quantum mechanics and coming up with great ideas. Not about people who were trained in a field using the technical knowledge they learned in that field to learn something related to that field. Seriously, fuck you.

This one out of context comment might sound very condescending, but black is actually a very close friend of mine. He knows I'm a linguistics graduate student, and he knows I study cross-linguistic differences in speech acquisition, most notably between English speakers and Mandarin speakers. That's why he didn't say "Any specific textbook recommendations for Mandarin," he said "Any specific recommendations about learning Mandarin?"

Here's the full conversation for anyone interested.

I post statuses about languages and language learning all the time, as well as articles about it. I'm insanely passionate about linguistics and language learning, and I've decided to dedicate my life to it by going to grad school and hopefully becoming a professor one day. Anyone who knows me knows this. Fuck you OP, if I ever find out who you are, we are never fucking speaking again.

Also, for anyone interested in why all of the dates in my image say "recently," check out the awesome "Demetricator" browser extension. It removes all the numbers from Facebook!

Cool! I highly recommend Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar, although you'll have to check the contents and then hunt down the 'same' concept in a few places (for instance, I think a couple of uses of 了 are scattered, and I think there are two places where they address 是...的...), but if you grab a notebook and just put it all in one place and look at it, the grammar is much simpler and easier (and radically different) than what they teach in school.