ix ;; possession structure

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Surprisingly, the general possession structure in Meixian (or just Chinese) isn't difficult. All it includes it learning one new character.

Writing the possession structure in Chinese isn't difficult at all - but saying is what most learners find challenging.

When saying 'my', you would write '我的'. Note that '的' directly translates to English as ''s'; if you were to translate '我的' literally, it would be 'I's'. For example, if you were to write 'my apple' in Chinese, you would write '我的蘋果'. But we'll get into nouns, etc, in future chapters.

Now, the spoken equivalent. This is a lot more complicated than it needs to be. I'll give an example of a sentence to make it easier to understand: 'My Hakka is not good' in Spoken Meixian is: '𠊎隻客家語唔好'. As someone who has been learning Hakka for a while now, you would probably recognise '唔好' ('not good') and '𠊎' ('I'). For the purpose of learning the possession structure in this chapter, let's assume that you know the word '客家語'. All that's left is '隻'. So, just what is it?

Words and words that behave like '隻' are classified as 'classifiers' in the Learning Chinese World, sometimes, additionally, called 'measure words'. In Chinese, you must put the suitable classifier before a noun. For example, we have the classifier '張' for flat things like paper, etc, '支' for slender objects like pencils, pens, etc and so on. In written Chinese, this rule still applies, in sentences like '我有一杯咖啡' ('I have a cup of coffee'), in which '杯' is the classifier for cups, '我要幾份功課' (I want some homework), in which '份' is the classifier for documents and so on. There are endless classifiers which, consequently, makes Chinese very difficult to learn. However, some nouns are more popular than others.

The possession structure in Spoken Meixian involves the pronoun (in this case, '𠊎') and the classifier for the noun after it. Remember when I said 'However, some nouns are more popular than others.' not too long ago? Thankfully, because of this, some classifiers are more popular than others too!

The most general one is '隻', said as 'zak2'. You could say this classifier before the majority of nouns, although before some it would sound a little weird to native speakers, but let's not think about that now.

Let's compare Written Chinese and Spoken Meixian in a sentence or two now:

'My Hakka'
Spoken Meixian: 𠊎隻客家語
Written Chinese: 我的客家語

Written Chinese doesn't use classifiers for its possession structure.

If you were to say 'my homework', the results would look like this:

𠊎份功課

As you can see, the result has changed a bit. This is because 'homework' ('功課') corresponds to the 'documents, etc' classifier. However, you could get away (just a bit!) if you were to 'replace' the actual classifier with 'zak1':

𠊎隻功課

Don't do this forever, though. You will have to learn more 'fitting' classifiers so your Chinese knowledge and vocabulary can grow consistently.

Now we've learnt the possession structure with one pronoun, let's learn it with only other one we know: 'you'.

As done before, all we need to do is replace the pronoun. So, 'your' is '你的' and the Meixian equivalent is '若[noun's classifier]' or just '若隻'; romanisation is 'ngi3 zak2'.

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