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Full transcript of three-patterns-80-percent. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvBZTBaX0Is

Three patterns, that’s it. That’s the difference between someone who memorizes Chinese for years and still freezes mid-sentence and someone who builds sentences on the fly after, you know, a single afternoon. And if you grew up hearing Cantonese at home, well, you’ve been sitting on the answer to fluent Mandarin your whole life without even knowing it. See, most people treat Chinese like a memory game, you know, thousands of characters, you know, endless vocabulary lists, you know, sentences you drill, you know, forget and then drill again. But here’s what nobody, you know, actually talks about, right? Chinese isn’t actually random. It’s one of the actual most logical languages on the planet. And after reverse engineering over, you know, 2,000 sentence structures with my team, we found that just three core patterns generate roughly 80% of everything you’ll ever need to say. And just by teaching students these three patterns, they already get a lot more Chinese down in a session than, you know, months of learning. Because once you see these patterns, you stop memorizing and you start building. I’m ShaoLan and I’ve helped over 600 Cantonese Americans learn Mandarin and improve Cantonese. And we don’t teach memorization, we teach pattern recognition. And so hopefully, you know, learning that today will be able to help you, too. All right, let’s get into it. So, pattern number one is called STPV O blueprint. Very long, but let’s be honest, when you first start to learn Chinese, what was the scariest part? For most people, it wasn’t the tones, it was the grammar. Because you feel like you need to memorize hundreds of rules, verb charts, and conjugation tables just to say, you know, I’m eating an apple. But you don’t actually need any of that.

[laughter] You need one structure. And that structure is actually much simpler than English. See, in English, you answer four questions to make a sentence. Who? [music] The person. What did they do? The action. Where the location happened? And [music] when? For example, I read a book at home yesterday. Or yesterday, I read a book at home. Notice how English lets you scatter time and place around whenever you want. English has a lot more ambiguity in its grammar structure. Whereas Chinese is a lot more strict, which actually makes it so once you know the rules, you just follow the rules and you’re good. In Chinese, you set the stage before the action happens. Time and place always come before the verb. Think of it like a movie director yelling, you know, lights, camera, action. You establish the scene and then you roll. So, let me kind of get a bit more specific. It goes subject, time, place, verb, [music] object or STPVO for short. Subject, time, place, verb, object. Let’s see it in action in Mandarin. Wo zuotian zaijia kan shu. Okay? Wo zuotian zaijia kan shu. Okay? Wo is I, zuotian yesterday, zaijia at home, kan means to look or to read and then shu means book, okay? Now, that same sentence in Cantonese because I know we have a lot of Cantonese to Mandarin people is ngo cham yat hai hai shu. Okay? Ngo cham yat hai okay hai shu. I yesterday at home read book. Okay? So, notice that both Cantonese and Mandarin follow the exact same structure. It’s because they’re both Chinese languages and so that’s why I always say like Cantonese speakers can learn Mandarin a lot faster. It’s because they literally have the exact same operating back end just different words, different bricks. Okay? So, why is this single rule so powerful and so important in Chinese? Well, it’s because it kills the translation trap. When you think in English and you try to translate into Chinese a lot of learners, what happens is they end up getting stuck. English grammar is really flexible. You can put time at the beginning or at the end. And so, your brain tries to mirror that flexibility in Chinese and it jams it in. And as a result, you know, you might have sentences that sound kind of funky, awkward. But knowing the framework, just knowing the base framework of Chinese grammar, you’re no longer translating, you’re just slotting things in. Subject goes here, time goes here, place goes here, verb goes here, object goes here. Done. And so, I want you to early on your Chinese learning journey think of Chinese like a game of Mad Libs, right? You have five slots, just fill them in order, and logic never breaks. And so, it’s like you don’t need to memorize a bunch of different rhyme sentence structures. You’re just mastering that one sentence frame, which generates thousands of possibilities. And that’s kind of the big difference here is you learn that one frame, you pretty much get everything. You know what I mean? Now, where this pattern might feel limiting is that naturally we know that real life is not just a single action, right? We don’t just say I went home. We normally stack actions together in in English or in Chinese. Rather than saying I went home, it’s you know, I went home to sleep. So, how do you connect multiple actions without everything falling apart? And this is where understanding the structure in Chinese helps a lot and makes it actually a lot simpler than English. Because this brings us over to pattern number two in Chinese, which is called the action chain. So, we’ve got the master blueprint for a single action, but like we said, right? Real life, we string actions together, right? I went home to sleep, right? Two actions there. [music] And this is where English gets harder. Because in English we connect actions with tiny filler words, to, by, with, in order to, right? I call these kind of like ghost words, right? They exist in English, but they actually have no direct match in Chinese. If you try to translate them, you end up spinning your wheels looking for a Chinese word that just doesn’t work the way you expect. And that’s actually what happens to a lot of learners from what we see. They think, “Okay, I went home to sleep. Uh [music] Okay, how do I say to sleep? Uh they know sleep is shueijiao, but they don’t know the word for to. Uh wo huijia uh to, I don’t know.” And they get wo huijia to shueijiao, which is not right. But, Chinese actually makes it a lot simpler for you. You just list the actions in the order they happen in real life. You don’t need a to or a by or a with, you just list them out. So, let me give you an example. I went home to sleep. What actually happens in real life? Well, first you go home, then you sleep. So, Chinese just says, cool, stack them. Wo hui jia shui jiao. That’s it. Just string the verbs together in order. That’s how Chinese works. Right, in [music] Cantonese, ngo faan uk kei fan gaau. The exact same, right? Ngo, I, wo, Mandarin. Faan uk kei, hui jia, for go home. Fan gaau, to sleep. Shui jiao, to sleep in Mandarin, right? So you see it’s the exact same, we just string actions one after the other in the order that they happen. Here’s another example, right? I went to China by plane, okay? And I notice in English, the sentence is actually a little backwards. In reality, you board the plane first, then [music] you arrive in China. But it says, I went to China by plane. So it’s a little bit backwards, but Chinese just follows the order. Wo zuo fei ji qu zhong guo. Wo zuo fei ji qu zhong guo. Ngo cho fei gei hui zhong guo. Ngo cho fei gei hui zhong guo. So ngo is I, Mandarin, wo. Cho fei gei, Mandarin, zuo fei ji. Hui zhong guo, qu zhong guo. The exact same in both Cantonese and Mandarin, just different pronunciation. But notice here, okay? There’s no by plane, and and notice how it follows the order exactly. It’s not, I travel to China by plane, it’s just, I [music] sit on a plane, go to China. It’s very very like like if you look at like think back to like caveman ancient times, people who were like [music] the first speakers of this language are just like observing, and exactly what they observe is exactly what happened. And then that became the language. Which is kind of funny, but that’s that’s literally it, honestly. Here’s another example, I eat with chopsticks. So notice here, English puts the tool in the end. But in real life, well, how do you eat with chopsticks? Well, the first thing you do is you use the chopsticks, and then you eat, right? So it’s the using chopsticks first. That’s the order of the actions. So just literally follow that order in Chinese. Wo yong kuai zi chi fan. Wo yong kuai zi chi fan. Okay? Use chopsticks. [music] Eat food. So, I use chopsticks to eat food. Very straightforward, right? No connectors or anything between. No like switching up the order. Cuz in English, you would say, “I use chopsticks to eat food.” Right? But then you got to put different connectors in. Or use I eat food using chopsticks. Two options there. There’s no two options in Chinese. Use that one option. You know what I mean? Very straightforward. And so, the key pattern to remember is that English always needs these what’s called preposition words or ghost words, right? To, by, with. Chinese just removes it and stacks the verb in real life order. Okay? Now, here’s where it gets, you know, very, very important to understand is it makes sense always. You can chain three, four, five actions together. For example, I flew to China to see my friend perform a dance. Real life timeline. Ride plane, go to China, see friend, perform [music] dance. [music] Okay? Exact same. Mandarin war. Send the plane. [music] To China. Look at my friend. [music] Perform dance. Right? So, you see it’s the exact order. Exactly. You just stack them. You could have 10 actions in there if you have enough actions in there. You know what I mean? So, like very key thing. Four verb phrases, zero prepositions. You’re really narrating reality exactly as it unfolds. And that’s how Chinese works. Probably asking yourself, “Is this Is Chinese the fancy timeline?” Yes. It literally is. It’s just like narrating a movie in time. Just imagine back then, and the caveman Chinese people, “Person go here. Person go here. Person go here.” That’s the language, okay? If you’re Cantonese speaker who wants to learn Mandarin, we have a free guide with kind of everything that kind of shows you how to map Cantonese Mandarin as well as improve your Cantonese. A link to that down below. Check that out. It is super helpful. I put a lot of stuff in there for you guys. Now you’ve got the stage and the script, okay? Pattern one, pattern two. But before we get to the final pattern, there’s one crucial upgrade that kind of ties everything that we’ve learned so far together. So right now you can set the scene with subject, time, place, verb, object, and then chain the actions together. So you can tell someone what happened in the perfect order, but you can’t tell them why it happened or kind of like what went wrong. And so, [music] you know, how do How do we do that? You know, to sound human we need logic bridges, which explains, you know, why we did certain things. So in English, the way it works is the cause and effect works like this. We say, for example, “Because I was hungry, I ate.” Uh we drop the so, right? Cuz technically it’s “Because I was hungry, so I ate.” We drop that, right? Just because I was hungry, I ate. Chinese, uh you know, coincidentally works just like math or coding, which sounds like we’re a bunch of nerds. I’m a nerd. [laughter] But it does. It It literally is if-then. If any of you guys are familiar with coding, it’s just an if-then statement. If this happens, then that. So to explain um logic bridges in Chinese, let’s look at how they work in English. A classic sentence. This is something that all of our parents said to us growing up. “If you finish your homework, then you can go play.” Okay? “If you finish homework, then you can use the Wi-Fi,” right? That’s a classic uh example growing up, right? “If you finish homework, you can use the internet.” Now, in English, it’s technically if-then, but we don’t need the then. So we could say, “If you finish homework, you can go play.” In English, we have flexibility to take out that second part, the result of that cause statement. The cause statement is if you do this, then you can do that. In English, you can take it out. Okay? Now in Chinese, we don’t allow you to take out the then or the if. So those must always be there. Besides that, it works the exact same way. So let’s look at our earlier example, right? I went home to sleep. Let’s upgrade it. Because I was tired, I went home to sleep. Okay? So, now in Chinese, [music] the way it’d be is because so. So, because I was tired, so I went home to sleep, right? That’s the cause and then the effect, cause and the result. Okay? We need to have that word there to indicate it. So, in Mandarin, yin wei wo hen lei, suo yi wo hui jia shui jiao. Yin wei ngo hou gui, suo yi ngo fan ok ban gao in Cantonese. So, yin wei yin wei, because ngo hou gui, wo hen lei, I’m very tired. Suo yi suo yi, so therefore, ngo I, wo in Mandarin, fan ok hui jia in Mandarin, ban gao shui jiao. So, the key thing to remember about this is that Chinese is very like it has rules and just sticks to rules, okay? It wouldn’t make sense if you took it out. Whereas English, what actually makes English hard for a lot of people I talk to them is that English allows a lot of leeway and has a lot of exception cases. Chinese doesn’t have as many, which makes it strict. But, once you learn the rules, it’s easy. You know what I mean? Now, another really useful pattern that a lot of people need early on is understanding how to use the word but in Chinese, right? And in Cantonese we use dan hai and in Mandarin we use dan shi. And it works very similar to English. So, for instance, I took a plane to China to see my friend, but they weren’t there. Wo zuo fei ji qu zhong guo jian peng you, dan shi ta bu zai. Ngo cho fei gei hui zhong guo gin peng you, dan hai che mui dou. Notice here, okay? Ngo becomes wo. I, cho fei gei, zuo fei ji, sat on the plane, hui zhong guo, qu zhong guo, to China, gin peng you, jian peng you, to see my friend, dan shi, dan hai, but, okay? Che mui dou, ta bu zai, [music] he or they weren’t there, right? And so, you notice it’s the exact same thing. I went to see a friend, but they weren’t there. It works the exact same way as English. This is an extremely useful word one to know. Everyone could use this one cuz it helps you express a lot more. K? Okay, cool. So, now you have how to set the stage, right? The STPV set framework of the scene. You know how to stack actions together. You know how to use logic bridges to kind of add more thought to it. But, the last one is expressing how time works in Chinese and how time factors into the sentence. This is the most important pattern of all Chinese and it’s the one that a lot of people get confused at because English has a whole like conjugation framework, whereas Chinese keeps it super simple. If you speak English, you know that verbs change shape depending on time. For example, drive became drove or it becomes driving. And what happens is people who try to learn Chinese, they think that same logic applies for Chinese when it really doesn’t. And that’s the part that makes Chinese actually not as hard as you think. Because here’s how Chinese actually handles time. You don’t change the verb, you just change the context [music] around it using tiny powerful words called particles. Think of your base sentence as like a raw photo, right? Particles are like the Instagram filters, right? You slap like the LA Instagram filter on your photo or whatever like that and it looks like it’s taken in LA or something like that. It changes the whole meaning without touching a single other word. So, let’s look at the three filters that kind of control time in Chinese. K? So, filter number one is right now or what’s called the progressive filter. To say something is happening right now, you add one particle. That’s it. In Mandarin, the particle is “zai”. And in Cantonese, the particle is called “gan”. And the difference is that in Mandarin, it goes before the verb. In Cantonese, it goes after the verb. So, for instance, sister is reading the newspaper. Do they even read the newspaper anymore? Whatever. K? Maybe I’m old. Uh-huh, I’m old. Okay, anyway. So, yeah, “jie jie zai kan bao zhi”. In Cantonese, “jie jie tai gan bao zhi”. “Jie jie tai gan bao zhi”. So, let’s compare. In Cantonese, “jie jie” in Mandarin becomes “jie jie”. Exact same. K? Now, in Cantonese, the verb for to look is tai [music] and Mandarin it’s kan. Okay? Just different words here, but same meaning. It’s like how America uses the subway, UK uses tube. Okay? But notice here, okay? In Cantonese the word gan comes after the verb. So, it’s tai gan. [music] Okay? That’s like looking. That gan acts as the ing. Looking. It means it’s happening right now. She’s looking at the paper. In Mandarin it goes before. So, that tai before is like the ing in English. Like looking. Okay? But it goes before the verb. So, tai kan. In Cantonese it goes after. Tai gan. And then bo zi bo zi is just newspaper. Okay? So, ze ze tai gan bo zi. In Mandarin, jie jie zai kan bo zi. Very similar. Here’s another one. He’s writing a report. Ta zai xie bao gao. In Cantonese, keui se gan bo gao. So, keui becomes ta, right? Same thing. Just kind of like tube and subway. Uh UK versus American English. Just different choice of words. Se is to write in Mandarin xie. And then notice in Cantonese se gan in Mandarin zai xie. So, remember that. Action right now. Particle happens before and one is after, right? And then bo gao is report and in Mandarin bo gao. Okay? The exact same. So, now that you can express right now, let’s handle the past. Or more accurately, completed actions. This is the same logic as filter number one. You don’t change the verb. You just add a particle. And that particle in Mandarin is la or in Cantonese it’s zo. Now, in Mandarin the particle goes after the verb or it goes at the end of the sentence. Whereas in Cantonese [music] it glues directly to the verb. So, let’s take an example. Mom has returned. In Mandarin, ma ma hui lai la. In Cantonese that becomes ma ma fan zo le. Okay? So, [music] ma ma becomes ma ma. Mom, obviously. Hui lai is the verb. In Cantonese fan le is the same verb. Means to return. Now, it has to say it it’s already complete. It’s already happened. So, in Mandarin that la goes at the end of the [music] sentence. Hui lai la or after the verb. Same thing here. In Cantonese, right? fan jo le, okay? fan jo le. So, notice here in Mandarin, the la acts like a stamp at the end, right? All done. But, Cantonese that jo is it kind of like jams itself right next to the verb. It actually breaks up that little verb phrase, fan le. Right? It breaks it up and it creates kind of like what’s called a verb sandwich. So, it comes fan jo le. Fan means to return, right? Le means to come. So, right? So, fan le means to return come. First, you return and then you come. So, fan le. That’s another video about how Chinese work, but basically, a compound verb in Chinese is actually just two actions that happen in a row. Here’s an example, right? Is the verb for tiao xuan, right? Tiao xuan means to pick and choose because tiao means to pick [music] and then xuan means to choose. So, tiao xuan together is a compound verb, right? It’s one two characters make up a verb, but in reality, it’s just two verbs that happen side by side. That’s really what a that is. And that’s how Chinese verbs kind of work. We have a whole video on how Chinese characters work. That’s kind of like a little refresher, right? And so, in the same way for this one, fan jo le, right? It sandwiches itself in between [music] those two verbs right there. Here’s another example, okay? He bought coffee. Ta mai le cafe. Ta mai le cafe. In Cantonese, keui mai jo cafe. Keui mai jo cafe. So, this one’s very similar with Cantonese and Mandarin because uh there’s only one verb here. So, ta is keui, which means he or she. Chinese is gender neutral. Mai is to buy, mai in Mandarin. La, jo comes after the entire verb, but after the first verb in Cantonese in this case since there’s only one verb, right? So, jo and then cafe, cafe is coffee. Now, in Mandarin, you can also say ta mai cafe le. You can put it at the end of the sentence, it’s totally fine. You put it in either place. Slight different meaning. Uh we’re not going to get into the difference of it in this video, but overall, it’s the same meaning of the action of buying coffee was completed. But, it’s very important, okay? So, the particle must touch the verb buy because you can’t hand over the coffee until the buying is done. So, the grammar kind of mirrors reality in Chinese. That’s why I say Chinese is really literal. The final one is future, things that will happen. So, luckily, this is actually where it’s the exact same both Cantonese and Mandarin, and in English. So, in English, we indicate future by will, right? I will do it. Cantonese and Mandarin, the exact same, and that word is wui [music] or wui in Cantonese. Same character, same position, same logic in English, Cantonese, Mandarin. Okay? [music] This is the easiest filter of all three, uh super straightforward. So, it will rain tomorrow. Ming tian hui xia yu. Ming tian hui xia yu. Cantonese, ting yat wui lok yu. Ting yat wui lok yu. So, ting yat, tomorrow, Mandarin, ming tian. Wui means will, Mandarin, hui. And then, lok yu is to uh rain, [music] Mandarin, xia yu. Here’s another example. We will meet. Wo men hui jian mian. Wo men hui jian mian. Ngo dei [snorts] wui gin mian. Ngo dei wui gin mian. So, ngo dei is we, Mandarin, wo men. Wui is will, Mandarin, hui. Gin mian is to see, to meet, Mandarin, jian mian. Okay? [music] Same thing. So, whatever verb you put after hui becomes future tense um in Mandarin. This one’s the easiest one. So, that’s it for today’s video. I hope you uh have found that helpful. Click here to watch the next video, and click here for a video that you could think you’ll love. Okay? Until next time, zoi gin, zai jian.