Ch 2 · Lesson 3Mandarin · Chapter 2 · Lesson 3 · Grammar primer
Relative clauses de
Grammar for AP Chinese.
The short version
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wǒ mǎi de shū
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Mandarin loads the whole relative clause in front of the noun and pins it on with (de), the exact reverse of English, and there is no word for who, which or that. The parsing trick: hunt for the (de), take the word straight after it as the head, then read the run-up as description.
。Wǒ mǎi de tài guì le.
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When everyone knows what you mean, leave the noun out and the (de) phrase means 'the one that': (wǒ yào hóng de), I want the red one; (tā shuō de shì zhēn de), what he said is true. It is the same trick that makes (wǒ de) mean mine.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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Lesson 3 of 15 in this chapter