Mandarin · Chapter 17 · Lesson 4 · Grammar primer

Relative clauses de

Grammar for HSK 4.

The short version

Scan ahead to 的 (de) and the noun is right behind it

Mandarin loads the whole relative clause in front of the noun and pins it on with 的 (de), the exact reverse of English, and there is no word for who, which or that. The parsing trick: hunt for the 的 (de), take the word straight after it as the head, then read the run-up as description.

我买的书 wǒ mǎi de shū

the book that I bought

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

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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 4 of 11 in this chapter

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