的: What DE Heck?!!

Today’s post is about a really fundamental Chinese particle, 的.

Today’s post is actually slightly abstract in nature, but it’s also about something that causes students confusion right from the beginning of their Chinese-learning journey (and I don’t blame them – it’s never really flagged in any Chinese learning resources). So, let me ask you. Why do some noun-phrases have 的 linking the adjective / description to the noun e.g. 很美的地方 and others don’t e.g. 中国菜? Can we use either? Do they have any difference in meaning? Let’s take a look!

You may be familiar with the basic rule for using 的 to link an adjective to a noun:

1-character adjective + noun e.g. 好朋友

2-character adjective* + noun e.g. 有趣的人

* this includes a 1-character adjective preceded by a degree marker e.g. 很好的朋友, because the ‘describing part’ i.e. 很好 is more than a single character.

This rule works 75% of the time (purely a ‘gut feel’ statistic), and the other 25% of the time, one of the following is usually the case:

– you are using 的 to show a possessive relationship and either (i) the noun has a close personal relationship with the possessor e.g. 我(的)妈妈、我(的)朋友、我(的)名字、我们(的)学校、他们(的)学校、他(的)女朋友; (ii) you are using 这儿 or 那儿 in phrases like 我们这儿 ‘here, where we are / at our place’、他们那儿 ‘there, where they are / at their place’.

– you’re using a rare single-syllable adjective that seems to often occur with 的 (and is often wrong without it) e.g. 新 ‘new’ in 我需要买几件新的衣服。 ‘I need to buy some new clothes.’ (though we often hear sentences like 中国最近开始用了一些新技术。 ‘China has recently started using some new technologies.’, without the 的).

– you are using several describing phrases to describe a noun, more than one of which should have 的 at the end, and delete all but the last one to avoid “double 的”. An example is 我的这件红色的衣服 ‘this red item of clothing of mine’, which would normally be said as 我这件红色的衣服. It certainly isn’t wrong to keep all the 的, but it is something like the difference between saying in English ‘the tall, dark, handsome stranger’ vs ‘the stranger who was tall and who was dark and who was handsome’ (a word buffet with only one flavour).

– the writing style is fairly formal, which often causes 的 to be dropped e.g. in a Chinese university prospectus, they might talk of their students ‘取得优秀成绩’ ‘obtain excellent results’, rather than what we might expect i.e. ‘取得优秀的成绩’, which is much more akin to what we might say in colloquial conversation. Note also that keeping sentences & phrases in 2-character units to give an ‘on-beat – off-beat’ rhythm is another reason why function words like 的 tend to get dropped in formal language.

– the writing style is fairly formal and 之, the classical near-equivalent of 的, is used instead e.g. 墨尔本是世界一等“宜居之城”。 ‘Melbourne is the world’s most liveable city.’, where ‘之城’ has replaced ‘的城市’.

Aside from these, there is one other important factor that affects the use / non-use of 的, which we are going to take a look at below.

You may be wondering why it is that although we say that words or phrases of 2 or more syllables must be joined to a noun using a 的, we very early on learn phrases like ‘中国茶’、‘英文老师’、‘中国话’ – all of which use multi-syllable words like ‘中国’ and ‘英文’ to describe a noun, yet there’s not a 的 in sight!

Why is this? Well, it’s to do with the number of concepts the speaker wants to highlight / that are relevant. When we use 的, there is actually a clear, active sense of the speaker linking two separate, individual concepts together – for instance, ‘今天的天气’ takes the 2 concepts of ‘weather’ and ‘today’ to make the phrase ‘the weather today’ / ‘today’s weather’. The key point here is that whoever hears this phrase will know that the speaker is wanting to talk about weather on the particular day of TODAY (which as you can probably feel, implies they might be comparing to the weather on other days). The listener thus gets the impression of 2 concepts having been dynamically linked together by the speaker.

On the other hand, if we don’t include the 的, such as in a phrase like ‘跑步冠军’ ‘champion runners’、‘生日蛋糕’ ‘a birthday cake’、‘家庭条件’ ‘how well-off your family is’、‘暧昧关系’ ‘ambiguous relationship’, the feeling is of the speaker referring to ONE single concept only. For instance, if we say ‘我们要给他买一个生日蛋糕’, we actually don’t really feel a sense of ‘cakes’ being an item under discussion which is then linked actively to the concept of ‘birthdays’, but rather a single item that we need to buy, which is called a ‘birthday cake’.

I know this is all a bit abstract (I warned you), so let’s look at the difference between a phrase with 的 and the same phrase without 的. Going back to a very basic example, let’s compare 中国菜 with 中国的菜.

Based on what I just mentioned above, we are to understand that ‘中国菜’ refers to ONE concept i.e. ‘Chinese food’, whereas ‘中国的菜’ refers to TWO concepts that are actively connected by the speaker i.e. ‘the food of China’. I might use ‘中国菜’ when I’m just talking about Chinese food as a ‘thing’, such as if somebody asked me what I liked to it, to which I can reply 我喜欢中国菜、我不爱吃中国菜、我会做中国菜 etc. Because ‘中国菜’ is a single concept, there is no sense of differentiating ‘China’ and its ‘food’. However, if we were having a discussion about several different aspects of China, and then one of us wanted to start talking about the aspect of its ‘food’, we might say something like ‘中国的音乐，外国人不一定喜欢，但中国的菜呢，几乎在全世界都受欢迎。’ ‘Non-Chinese won’t necessarily like Chinese music, but as for China’s food, it’s popular almost across the entire globe.’. We can see here that the ‘中国’ part is a theme that has already been established earlier in the discussion, whereas the mention of ‘菜’ is a new topic introduced later on. This is why we have to refer to ‘Chinese food’ as TWO concepts that are being linked – because our conversation has set up a sense of comparison, or a sense that ‘China’ and its ‘food’ are differentiated.

I know this is a bit of a mind-bender, so let’s look at another example. If you ask your Chinese friend where they’re from, they might reply with ‘我是北京人。’. In this context, differentiating ‘北京’ and its ‘人’ would be weird, but is there a context where saying ‘北京的人’ would make sense? What about if, say, we were talking about another aspect of Beijing first – perhaps its pollution problem, and we then wanted to make a comment about the people of Beijing, we could in fact say ‘北京的空气污染问题很严重，但是北京的人特别热情。’ ‘Although Beijing has a serious air pollution problem, its people are very hospitable.’

Okay, last thing to say about this (finally!). Remember how we said 的 shows we’re connecting two concepts together? Well it kind of makes sense that once that connection has been made in a conversation, you can then refer to that concept as a SINGLE thing thereon. This in fact is exactly what does tend to happen. For instance, if two friends are gossiping about two of their classmates, they might say ‘他们有暧昧的关系’ ‘They have an ambiguous relationship’, using the 的 to connect ‘暧昧’ and ‘关系’. However, when they want to refer to this ‘ambiguous relationship’ thereupon, because they’ve established it as a THING in the discourse, they can drop the 的 and talk about it like it’s a SINGLE concept. For instance, they might perhaps say, ‘他们都是单身的，可是因为有暧昧关系嘛，都害怕受伤。’ ‘They’re both single, but because of their ambiguous relationship, they’re both scared of getting hurt.’. If you’re familiar with programming languages, it’s kind of like defining a variable and then referring to its value simply by the variable name thereon i.e.

               “暧昧关系” = 暧昧 + 关系

(‘this thing we refer to as ‘ambiguous relationship’ is their relationship (关系), which we both know is ambiguous (暧昧))

Okay, that’s it for now! I’m not sure if that all made sense, but I’m happy to answer any questions about this in the comments. 加油！