虚词"很":empty word "very"

The Chinese empty word (虚词) "很" means "very". This translation is straightforward and universally accepted. But there's one little subtlety in its actual usage: "很" is used more often in Chinese than "very" in English. This causes some descriptions using an adjective in Chinese not really "very" much so (if everything is very good, nothing is really that good). For instance, "He's good", "He's good at playing cards" may be translated as "他很好", "他很会打牌"， although they can also be "他不错", "他牌打得[很]好". The sentence "他很好" is not likely to be changed to "他好", which sounds odd, and "他很会打牌" may be misunderstood if shortened to "他会打牌" ("He knows how to play cards"). The apparently superfluous "很" serves no purpose other than making the sentence sound more native. But translators may not realize this and tend to literally translate "很" to "very". This practice seems to be particularly widespread among the translators living in China. I believe the correct way to deal with "很" is to review the context and ignore it if it does not really carry the meaning of "very".

Chinese "empty word" 虚词

The term "empty word", or "虚词", in Chinese, refers to "a word or morpheme that has no lexical meaning and that functions as a grammatical link or marker, rather than as a contentive" according to Dictionary.com. Specifically, they include prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary words or "Chinese particles", onomatopoeias, interjections, and adverbs[note1]. But in spite of its long history (back to 1890 to 1895, perhaps invented by a missionary or sinologist), the translation "empty word" has the connotation that the words, whoever utters, are not to be trusted, while "虚词" in Chinese is a purely technical, grammatical, term. This makes "empty word" a poor translation for "虚词", although no better one has been proposed. Incidentally, "hollow word", if it were used as a translation, may be closer literally ("hollow" for "虚"), but also has unwanted connotations.

Wikipedia considers the word "expletive" as the equivalent of "虚词". We need to think beyond the more common meaning of "expletive" here (words of profanity), and only consider syntactic expletive and expletive attributive. Because of its common usage of the word, neither is perfect in my opinion. In addition, be aware that an expletive in English is not quite equivalent to a "虚词" in Chinese. The latter is purely based on word class, while grammatical expletives in English are more context-sensitive. That is, all adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, "Chinese particles", onomatopoeias, and interjections in Chinese are "虚词", with no exception, but there's no such simple rule in English.

Probably because of Wikipedia's English rendering of "虚词" as "expletive", pages of other languages use incorrect or not quite correct words, such as explétif in French, Kraftausdruck in German (words to express strong feelings, swears, expletives), where Formwörter^[note2] or mot-particule^[note3] may be a better term. But the Japanese page uses the Kanji 虚辞.

_________________
[note1] This footnote is needed to avoid simplistic equivalence: English adverbs include almost all words of the construct adjective-ly, but Chinese adverbs are more or less limited to "very", "little", "all", "also", "probably", etc.
[note2] This word may have been coined by German sinologists about a century ago, as in Vergleich der wichtigsten formwörter der chinesischen umgangssprache und der schriftsprache
[note3]> as in Le mot-particule 之 tchē

Off-topic: Learn English to Know China

I read this on weibo.com, the Chinese equivalent of Facebook: "We used to learn English to know the world. We now learn English to know China" (当初我们学英语是为了了解世界，如今我们学英语是为了了解中国). (The earliest occurrence of this quote as of now is on Twitter authored by huqiwen.) The apparent oxymoron in the second sentence is one of the best remarks on the national censorship. Although any web site deemed sufficiently government-unfriendly is blocked, those in English are generally in much better shape than those in Chinese. If this were not so, learning English to know China would be just as ineffective as reading Chinese materials.

Follow-up to "Why the Chinese language should not adopt phonetic writing"

In October 5, 2011, I posted Why the Chinese language should not adopt phonetic writing?, where I brought up Sun Yat-sen's statement that romanization of the written Chinese would contribute to disintegration of China due to markedly diverse pronunciations of the Chinese dialects. Two points I want to make today. First, Sun was unlikely the first to observe that. According to 李玉刚's 《狂士怪杰：辜鸿铭别传》 p.74 (Li Yugang, Alternative Biography of Ku Hung-Ming, 1999, Beijing), 马建忠 very closely alluded to the idea when he explained why the ancient Greek, Roman, and Indian, but not the Chinese, civilizations, withered, at a private "lecture" to Ku: "正是这种方块汉字，才使我们每个中国人，能够不分地域和方言地聚合在一起。因为，在这世界上，怕只有我们中国人，可以因地域不同有着各式各样发音的方言，但大家所使用的文字，都是这同一种方块字。"(It is these square-shaped Chinese characters that enable us the Chinese to come together, without regard to region and dialect. Because, in this world, I'm afraid, only we Chinese have dialects of all kinds of pronunciations due to disparity in region and yet everybody writes the same square-shaped characters.) Based on the context, Ma's lecture was probably made in 1879, most definitely earlier than Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People.

Secondly, if the mutually unintelligible Chinese dialects are the reason for not romanizing the Chinese writing system, one may naturally follow up with a question, What is the effect of the Putonghua movement? This is an excellent question. It's possible that in one or two more generations, the mainland Chinese will almost all be able to understand and even speak Putonghua. While everybody cheers for that achievement, should we bring up the topic of Chinese romanization again, since the socio-linguistic condition used by Ma and Sun as an excuse one hundred years ago ceases to exist? There's still a very strong technical reason against romanization though: too many homophones, i.e. too many different characters pronounced the same. But at least there's one less reason left. People, including me, who cherish the beauty and elegance of Chinese characters, together with the culture intertwined with them, will have to fight harder against romanization, if the topic will be brought up again.

Learning ... as a second language

Teaching English, Chinese, or any language as a second language must obey the rule that the students learn the fastest when they understand a certain amount of materials, either spoken or written. Without scientific study, I place the "certain amount" at roughly 75%, beyond which the students find it boring, and below which they find it too challenging to be interesting. A local high school in the town is academically reputed in all subjects, including foreign languages. The Advanced Chinese class is taught by teachers from Taiwan, who are excellent in the Chinese language and less than desired in English. As the class is taught in mostly Chinese, almost all students are Chinese-descent so as to be able to follow the teacher's instructions; basically, students not hearing Chinese in everyday life have a hard time to survive. Another high school not far away is not as competitive, and the Chinese class is taught by one whose mother tongue is English. The class is full of white and black students fully engaged and sufficiently but not overly challenged. A similar case is given by a friend of mine, who opened a foreign language school in southern China in the 1990's. Initially, the students demanded foreign teachers, who were fairly expensive back then. Recently, my friend said, some of her students "became more realistic" and preferred Chinese teachers, because they "felt they learned more" this way.

In a nutshell, other things being approximately equal, the determining factor for the fastest progress, and as a side effect, personal interest, is the percentage of the language that can be understood. The graph of the learning speed vs. material or class difficulty may be a bell-shaped curve centered around 75% of materials understood on initial reading or hearing as a metric for difficulty. Now, all I wish is a proof from a controlled study by psychologists or educational scientists.

P.S. There is one unique aspect in teaching Chinese as a second language. Traditionally, the students are required to memorize the characters completely so they can write them manually. As everyone knows, the Chinese writing system is not spelling-based and so poses the greatest difficulty to all students. With the advent of computer technology and acceptance of the unofficial standard of input, pinyin, one no longer needs to completely memorize a character to "write" it; he only needs to recognize the one out of multiple given by the IME, Input Method Editor. (A classical example is "嚏" as in "喷嚏", "sneeze", which few Beijing University students can write with free hand.) This has made significant impact on all the people around the world using the Chinese language, businessmen, workers, students, and teachers themselves. Unfortunately, some teachers in some schools still require the students to write the characters in hand, wasting their energy otherwise available to study more characters, more sentence structures, or more culture topics.

"Ni Hao Ma" (你好吗） is not a native Chinese greeting

I keep hearing non-native Chinese speakers greet a native Chinese with a friendly "Ni Hao Ma?" (你好吗?). It's time to set this straight: "Ni Hao Ma" is not native Chinese. It sounds so artificial that a native speaker immediately envisions a foreigner speaking with a big smile but drifting tones. I'm not sure why this 3-character greeting is not used by the Chinese but mostly used by foreigners. I think it has to do with a direct translation of "How are you?" What else could be a better translation of this 3-word English phrase?

So what's the native Chinese greeting? It's a simple "Ni Hao!" (你好!). Why do the Chinese people not like to append a "Ma" (吗)? I don't know. Whoever invented "Ni Hao", perhaps during the Vernacular Chinese Movement a hundred years ago, probably didn't like to make this frequent greeting phrase any longer than necessary.

If you do need to ask the question as if saying How's your situation?, "Ni Hao Ma?" certainly makes sense. That is, this 3-character question is used in an inquiry, not greeting. But in that case, "Ni Hai Hao Ma?" (你还好吗?) or "Ni Zuijin Zenme Yang?" (你最近怎么样？) may be just as or even more common. Similarly, you ask the plural "you" with "Ni Men Hai Hao Ma?" (你们还好吗?) or "Ni Men Dou Hai Hao Ma?" (你们都还好吗?).

[2012-06 Update] A Taiwanese pointed out to me that "Ni Hao Ma?" is said among Taiwanese. I don't recall hearing them say that in a greeting; I can't imagine two native Chinese/Taiwanese walking toward each other and both saying "Ni Hao Ma?" to each other, shaking hands. But it may be because I haven't had enough greetings with them. If "Ni Hao Ma?" is more common among Taiwanese and "Ni Hao" more common among the mainlanders, again, in greeting, not inquiry, then this posting may be titled something like "Ni Hao Ma?" is not a native mainland Chinese greeting. (After all, there's not one single Chinese linguistic authority in the world, but as many as the number of regions where the majority of the population speak Chinese.)

[2013-05 Update] In case a reader is still confused, I'd like to briefly emphasize the main point: The single Chinese word "问候" has two meanings, greeting and inquiry. In the sense of greeting, "你好!" is the choice. In the sense of inquiry, "你好吗?" is a perfect question sentence. This short note is about greeting, as when two friends run into each other on the street and neither had any recent incident that would worry the other. Saying "你好吗?" as a greeting sounds foreign, or causes confusion or misunderstanding.