Plaintive Mewling

When I first started learning Mandarin, “le” (了) seemed simple enough: slap it on the end of a sentence, or sometimes right after the verb, to make the sentence past-tense. Then it started creeping into other places that seemingly had nothing to do with the past tense — even in sentences about future actions — and I became confused. Now I think maybe it’s starting to make sense again.

The root of the confusion is that Mandarin does not express past events using the same mental model as English. To put it in nerdy computer-science terms, English’s notion of time is level-triggered, while Chinese is more edge-triggered. That is, English models an event as an indivisible whole, and it either occurs before the present time or after the present time or is currently happening. The Chinese notion is instead, has this event gone from “happening” to “not-happening” (where that can mean “finished” or “failed” or other things.) “了” expresses the transition.

So, for example, in English we say “I ate dinner.” In Mandarin it’s “我吃晚饭了,” literally “I eat dinner [weird mystery word]”. What that actually means is, “The action of me eating dinner has ended.”

Okay, that one is simple, the sort of thing that made me think 了 was just a past-tense marker at first. Now let’s take a more confusing one. “I’m going to leave,” which you say as “我要走了.” Literally “I will go [mystery word].” If 了 was just a past-tense marker, then that sentence would be nonsense. But with 了 as a transition marker, you can think of it as “The act of me going will finish.” In other words, “I’m going to leave.”

“我中文学了两年了” means “I’ve been studying Chinese for two years.” What’s up with the two “了”s there? Here the first 了 refers to the transition from “not studying” to “studying” rather than the other way around. So you can pick this apart as “I started studying Chinese, and two years have finished going by.”

Okay, how about “今天的天气太热了” meaning “The weather is too hot today?” That’s also a transition, though it’s a little harder to spot: the weather wasn’t too hot before, but today it has gone from “not too hot” to “too hot.” The “了” still indicates a change in condition.

Of course, like any other language, these rules aren’t hard and fast and the person you’re talking to will pay attention to the context of the conversation; you can throw in an extra 了 or leave one off and most of the time people will still understand what you mean.

Any native speakers reading this are invited to comment. Do I have it more or less right, or am I completely misunderstanding what it’s all about?

Either way, this is a great example of one of the reasons I chose Chinese as a language to learn: it is great brain exercise because speaking it forces me to think in different terms, not just speak a different set of words in a slightly different order.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 18th, 2006 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Chinese. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.