#grammar guide

There's also Tae Kim's Grammar Guide, which is free and understandable.

It's finally here! As a professional editor, I wanted to compile some quick and easy grammar, style, and characterization tips tailored to suit the needs of fanfiction writers. Organized into sections covering grammar, formatting, and tips for writing everything from dialogue to character descriptions, this guide is for anyone struggling to write.

To access, click the link below the beautifully done graphic. Please note, you'll need access to Google Docs in order to access the guide. If this is an issue for you, please DM me and I can see what I can do to get you a copy.

As promised, this guide is 100% free. However, if you'd like to toss me some coin for my efforts, you can buy me a little Kofi:

when you’re saying something like “good luck doing x, much less y” (example: “good luck getting the mattress to the airport, much less on the plane”) the goal is that the easier subject goes FIRST, and THE HARDER subject goes LAST. another example! “she doesn’t even have a bike, much less a car”! the goal is that “much less” is an exaggeration for a second subject that is worse than the first subject!

Helllooo! Sorry that this weeks is a little late!

Following on from last week's introduction of the dual, I thought it might be a good time to look at the dual form of verbs and the dual pronouns.

These are used for saying phrases like "both of you ate the food", "they both looked strange" etch., specifying two people! This is something built into the grammar, and all in all, it's not as common as other forms (how often do you refer to just 2 of something??) but it's an important feature of Arabic!

With that let's get started~

Dual Pronouns

The bad news - you have to learn another 2 pronouns. The good news - thankfully, the dual is used for both genders ( you don't have a separate pronoun to refer to"2 women", for example.) NOTE: if you are using a gendered dual ( e.g. 2 girls (البنتان)), then you must use the corresponding gendered verb. Only the pronouns are non-gender specific.

Here they are:

انتما

هما

the top one is 'antumma (you two) and the bottom is humma (them two).

Subject Verb agreement is very important in Arabic, so here's how to form a dual verb to match these pronouns.

Dual verbs

Like nouns, the dual marker with verbs is ـان. However, if the verb is in the accusative or the genitive (see this post for more info on cases), the ن is dropped. For example:

أكل -- يأكلان --تأكلان -- يأكلا--تأكلا

Above from right to left we have:

I/he ate (past tense sing/masc)

those two eat (masculine e.g. the two boys eat, nominative, present tense)

those two eat ( feminine, e.g. the two girls eat, nominative, present tense)

those two eat (masc, gen/acc, present)

those two eat (fem., gen/acc, present)

Try out some other form 1 verbs ( if you want to know more about forms, check out this post!)

Most writers I know have a love-hate relationship with commas, omitting them where they should be added and adding them where they should be omitted. As a line editor, the most common punctuation issues I see stem from incorrect comma use.

So, how do you use commas correctly?

Let me guide you through the next step of your journey toward punctuation perfection.

Are you someone who never got a formal education in grammar?  Are you an author or someone else who has to write a whole heck of a lot and worry about your lack of grammatical knowledge hinders your ability to communicate effectively? Do you want to spend less on copy editing? Then Everyday Grammar Made Easy might help.

So this book is what it says on the tin. It's a guide to the basics of grammar that often feels like an extended vocabulary lesson rather than an actual education. The knowledge imparted is old school and skewed toward the University of Chicago school of grammar. Which is fine, but it may contradict some things if your workplace/employer uses the AP style guide.

So when in doubt, check first.

The book is also old school in how it approaches gender. While it acknowledges that there are people tho use the singular they, the book doesn't get into neo-pronouns (Xhe. e, ir, etc.) which okay... but it would help to acknowledge that language is evolving and new words come into existence including those referring to gender. Especially since figuring out proper verb tense is a thing. In a way, I feel like this was a missed opportunity and perpetuates the falsity of a gender binary.

As an editor with 25 years of experience, this book was a little elementary for me. I was also very lucky that the school systems I attended gave me a very solid foundation in grammar.-- complete with the knowledge of how to diagram a sentence. But my experience is not a universal experience, and most people I know don't understand how to use the subjunctive (Thank you,  Spanish!) or how to punctuate a parenthetical. That said, it does cover a few areas that often trip up less formally educated writers. Things like when to use I or Me in the predicate or subject-verb agreement.  I did like that there was a chart at the back of the book that provided an easy reference guide on how to conjugate irregular verbs. But at the same time, I didn't love the long hard to read list of regular verbs. It didn't feel necessary.

The book was laid out in a logical fashion, and it did what it said it was going to do... it explained the basics of grammar. And while it did cover some of the most common pitfalls, it didn't go into other areas where people struggle... like how to punctuate dependent clauses, prepositional phrases, and how to tell if information is important to a sentence or extraneous (which is a common issue I run into when copy editing). For instance, it covered what to do punctuation wise if you start a sentence with a subordinating conjunction (since, because, as, etc.) but not what to do if the subordinating conjunction is use in the middle or at the end of a sentence. I felt like it was missing things. Like the order of adjectives, how to identify and correct misplaced modifiers, how to identify a prepositional phrase vs. a dependent clause vs an independent clause, etc. Things that would have helped nervous writers avoid some common pitfalls.

But it isn't a bad book.I would likely recommend it to people who really never got the basics of English grammar or for people who are ESL and want to have a name for a lot of the terminology. But I feel it is important to note that this book doesn't go into everything and is more clearly geared for non-fiction/essay writing rather than fiction writing.

Ultimately, I feel that this book deserves...

Four Stars.

If this is your jam, you can get it here.

If you like these kind of honest reviews, please consider supporting us here!

👨🏻‍🎓🏫 THE PERFECT GIFT FOR BACK-TO-SCHOOL.

Okay I've found some grammar guide summaries I think would work well for beginner learners to read through. Not memorize, just read through and try to understand and recognize a bit more than you did beforehand.

Reading the grammar points can be an introduction, and then later as you encounter grammar when watching shows or reading and get curious of what something means/why it works that way, then you can look up particular grammar points to study more. Since that introduction you read will have given you a general idea of what grammar points to be aware of. (I recommend AllSetLearning Chinese Grammar Wiki for looking up specific points later in your study as you get confused or curious, I looked up grammar involving 把 的 得 地 on that site a lot when I started trying to read more)

You don't have to read any grammar as a beginner! That's ultimately going to come down to you and what you prefer and what works for you! For me, just reading grammar 15-30 minutes a day for a few weeks to get a rough idea of what grammar would look like, helped me a lot later. It helped with me gradually understanding grammar more as I read more (graded readers then cdrama subs then webnovels), and it helped me identify What grammar confused me when reading so I could look up specific grammar point explanations then.

Beginner Guide to Chinese Grammar from AllSetLearnimg. I think personally a beginner might also want to look up all uses of 的 得 地, 把 and 了 even if they don't understand all those points when they read - as being aware of the work these things do can help you figure out what's going on in sentences you read (or figure out what grammar points you'll want to study more in depth later). 地 often comes at the end of adjectives to be like -ly ending in english and a beginner might benefit from knowing it does that, to help guess which words in sentences are doing what work. 得 is both "must" and serves other grammar functions, so it's worth being roughly familiar with those functions. 的 can be like the english 's which is how some explanations teach it, but it can also attach one sentence clause to another (in english a sentence clause between two commas , goes in the middle, in chinese it goes in the beginning with a 的 at the end). I think it may also help to read more about how go and have can relate to communicating past tense in chinese, so reading more about 去 过 没 没有 and examples of them used in present tense or when describing past tense. So beyond the Beginner Guide on this site, I'd suggest looking up those other grammar points and just reading through even if you don't "get" it yet. The awareness these things exist will be helpful later when you've seen more chinese.

DigMandarin HSK Grammar Guides. If this site makes you click for access, then on this page click the link in bottom that says Access and it will take you to the grammar guide pages. This page is the HSK 1 guide, and you can find the other HSK 2-6 guides linked at the top of the page. I haven't read through all of these, but I'm going to recommend because eaxh HSK guide is around 15 pages. So its like 90 pages total (probably shorter considering the pages have a lot of white space), and therefore as a grammar guide it can be read fairly easily in a few weeks or less if you just read for 15-30 minutes a day. I wanted to recommend a guide to learners that's a summary, that is short and doesn't get too down in the weeds (AllSetLearning is great but its individual grammar point pages are Super In Depth and great for if you are confused about a specific topic but not ideal if you just want a quick summary), so new learners can get an overview they can use as their very basic foundation of knowledge. You can learn more about grammar later (or immediately if you're into that), but just a few hours of reading a grammar guide summary to give you a basic idea of structure can help a lot. And it doesn't have to take months, you don't need to memorize for it to be useful.

NOTE: to see most grammar points on this DigMandarin site's guide, download the PDF versions (linked at the top) because explanations appear paywalled on the website version. Also, unfortunately, you're going to need to look up an explanation of 的 because this guide didn't include one for free. Well that's annoying. Here's the 的 page on AllSetLearning, I'd recommend just reading each grammar point article linked on that page.