“Series of Teaching Foreigners Chinese Grammar” is the achievement of “Research and Development of Grammar Syllabus for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language and Teaching Reference Grammar Series (Multi-volume)”, a major project of National Social Science Fund of China sponsored by Professor Qi Huyang, which has been selected as the “2022 Founding Project of National Publication Foundation”. As an important reference book for international Chinese language education, it aims to build and improve the “Grammar System of Chinese Teaching” for foreign students to meet the development needs of the new era. It mainly serves the first-line Chinese teachers, researchers, graduate students and undergraduates majoring in Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages. This series consists of 39 volumes, including 4 outline series, 26 book series, 8 summary series, and 1 collection of essays.

This book is a sub-volume of the second series of 26 volumes.

The traditional syntax puts “subject-predicate-object” together which shows the importance of the object as a syntactic constituent. It can be perceived as an important issue in the study of teaching Chinese as a foreign language for its complex semantic identity and uncertain syntactic position. Focusing on the object, this book targets the problems in teaching Chinese as a foreign language from the ontology. This book designs a total of 72 questions, which can be divided into 10 parts, discusses the basic concepts related to the object, the number and invisibility of the object, the relationship between the object and other syntactic constituents such as the subject, as well as the relationship with related syntactic patterns such as “把”-sentence, etc., analyses the causes of some typical object bias problems, and give examples of teaching suggestions for object-related problems.

Guo Xiaolin, the editor-in-chief, holds a PhD in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics of Beijing Language and Culture University(BLCU), where she is now a professor and doctoral supervisor. Her research mainly focuses on the study of modern Chinese grammar and grammar teaching. She has published many papers in professional journals such as Chinese Teaching in the World, three academic monographs, and many textbooks as editor-in-chief or co-editor.

Lu Rong, the author, holds a PhD in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics of Shanghai Normal University, and she is now an associate professor and postgraduate supervisor at College of Literature of Jinan University. Her research mainly focuses on modern Chinese grammar and Chinese second language acquisition. She has presided over one national and one Ministry of Education youth social science project, and published several papers in professional journals such as Chinese Teaching in the World.

Is it necessary to study the object separately? -- Don’t underestimate the object.

“It seems that the subject is only one of several objects of the verb put forward for the place of the subject. It is as if several members of a committee, each with his or her own position, could take turns being chairman during a meeting, though some are more or less frequent, and some are always out of turn” ......

The object is often discussed together with the subject whose status is at the highest level, but the importance of the object is not less than that of the subject. More importantly, there are even some cases in which some words have the object status first and then acquire the subject status by shifting, for example, “吃面包→面包吃了”, “写文章→文章写了” and so on.

Is the teaching of object grammar difficult? -No!

When talking about grammar books, we usually think of the obscure one, right? No, no, no, this book is absolutely not. What’s the difference between “张三追累了李四” and “张三骑累了马”? What’s the difference between “她恨死我了” and “我恨死她了”? Why can’t we say “读和写一本书”? ...... This book is, on the whole, full of interesting questions such as the above ones, each of which is designed to help readers solve similar problems from what the authors have learnt in their years of teaching.

The author has translated some existing research findings from a pedagogical point of view, or expressed her own thoughts on some issues in an easy-to-understand and interesting way, making it possible for readers, regardless of their professional backgrounds, to get direct references from the book.

What can this book bring to us?  

We do not seek to solve all the object-related problems of teaching Chinese as a foreign language, but we do seek to build up a basic knowledge framework about the object under the guidance of the principles of universality, practicability and dispersion, with a view to providing some concrete and feasible teaching references and help in theoretical knowledge, object acquisition and object teaching.

It is recommended for front-line teachers of international Chinese language education, researchers of teaching Chinese as a foreign language, and graduates of international Chinese language education and linguistics and applied linguistics.