Ch 10 · Lesson 13

Weile purpose clauses

Prescribed by the AQA specification.

The short version

(wèile) puts the goal before the action

,。Wèile tōngguò kǎoshì, wǒ fùxíle hěn duō.

In order to pass the exam, I revised a lot.
Why?

English usually states the action first and tacks the purpose on at the end; Mandarin leads with the goal. (wèi le jiàn kāng), (tā měi tiān yùn dòng) reads literally as 'for the sake of health, he exercises every day' - train yourself to produce that order even though it feels backwards.

The (le) inside (wèi le) never marks a tense

,。Wèile jiànkāng, tā qùnián kāishǐ yùndòng.

For the sake of his health, he started exercising last year.
Why?

(wèi le) already contains (le), but it is a fixed part of the word, not the aspect particle that marks completion. It stays exactly as written whether the sentence is about the past, present or future - any completion marker the action itself needs attaches to the main verb instead.

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.

Read the full article · 6 min read

Practice

Practise this lesson

10-question session

One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 24 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.

Lesson 13 of 16 in this chapter

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