The Popular Chinese Soap Opera "Struggle"

The 2007 Beijing-based Chinese soap opera "Struggle" is a great language corpus for modern vernacular Mandarin. Using contextualised quotes, this book shows the reader how the directions implied by the verbs li 'come' and q 'go' are sometimes different from what is stipulated in the textbooks; how some pronunciations deviate from Pnyn; how and when a role-pronoun is used; as well as a representative selection of words and usages current in this soap opera but which are not listed in the authoritative dictionary of modern Mandarin, the Xindi Hny Cdin. In addition to the linguistic aspects, the history of Chinese soap opera, ideological constrains, and the overall plot of "Struggle" are also included to place the kind of Mandarin Chinese this book deals with in a concrete historical and social context. The pragmatic contexts matter because the kinds of linguistic observations this book makes are all pragmatically context-bound. This book presents in an orderly manner certain features of informal speaking practices that should be of great interest to any learner of modern Chinese.