Multilingual Experiment: Yes, No and "Give"

Ju is 9 and a half months and for the past two months, has been hearing pretty much everything in triplicate, as our multilingual project goes into full swing. Ju reacts very reliably to "NO!", "NEIN!" and "BU KE YI!" but he also reacts to other phrases. Most important, the 3 languages are very different in terms of structure but more for Chinese. Aside from the pesky cases in German, simple German is structured very similarly to English:

EN: Give me the ball.

GER: Gib mir den ball.

But in Chinese, you would conjugate this sentence very differently, because we place the object (the ball) in front and importantly, there is no "the" since we don't use articles before nouns, but there is a term 把 "ba" which you have to place in front of the noun so that it makes sense:

CH: 把球给我 (ba qiu gei wo)

So if you wanted to tell a native Chinese speaker from a non-native one (who used the online translator for example), he/she would say: 给我球 (lit: give me ball). But this is a literal translation from English and doesn't work in Chinese. Verbs would never come in front of the noun in Chinese unless it is used in the Interrogative:

CH: 给我! (no article)

EN: Give it to me!

GER: Gib es mir!

And as you can see, again, there is no need for an article (it) in Chinese.The word 把 is a curious little word with mutiple meanings. It is an article as in 一把刀 (a knife) where 把 indicates the article associated with the noun knife. Or, as in the way I used it above when asking Ju to give me the ball, it's necessary when forming such sentences (1):

我把蛋糕吃完了

Lit: I (the) cake eat finish already

where 了(can be loosely translated as "already") is the clause that changes the sentence to the past or present perfect tense and  把 indicates that I did an action to the cake (I ate it). Or (2):

请把书还给我

Lit: Please (the) book return give me

where 请 means "please" in the most polite and formal form; 把 again indicates that an action is to be done to the book (return it); and 还给我 means "return to me" although the formation in Chinese is "return give me". Again, no articles necessary and in the interrogative form, you drop the 请 so it means "Return the book to me". As I said, the noun always comes first, but you need the clause 把. 

NEGATIVES

Unlike in the English "No" and German "Nein", Ju would not have heard any Chinese equivalent. Instead, we use different negating words depending on the context. This video is great in explaining how we negate in Chinese.

Ju hears mostly these phrases:

EN: No!

GER: Nein!

CH: 不可以! 

Bu Ke Yi (Cannot, Must not)

In Chinese, 不 (bu) doesn't mean anything on its own. It has to paired with 可以 (can) to mean cannot, and the implied of course is the action. So I would yell at Ju: 不可以进厨房 (lit: cannot go into kitchen).

To answer a question in the negative, as in "No. I don't want", in Chinese we say 不要 without having to say what it is (the article "it"). So I would ask Ju:

EN: Do you want it?

CH: 你要不要? (lit: You want don't want?)

And to indicate negative quantity, we say 

EN: There is no more.

GER: Es gibt kein mere.

CH: 没有了 (lit: don't have already)

where 有 means "to have" and 没有 negates it. So for Singaporeans, you get why people like saying "don't have!" when they mean "there isn't any" or "don't have anymore" when they mean "there isn't any left". So in Chinese, 了modifies "don't have" depending on what you mean:

没有了 no more left

吃了 have eaten

不要了don't want anymore

可以了 (now) (you) can

The best part about learning a language as a child is how you pick up these rules of grammar naturally just by listening to the phrases and sentences every day. I don't have to teach it to Ju formally and it is only when I thought about writing this post that I realised just how many rules and how complicated Chinese really is if you try to learn it with the rules of grammar!

Here is another great video which describes the rules of structuring sentences in Chinese (some of them).