Lesson 10 How to understand and use Chinese sentence pattern “…把…”

If you’ve tried to read some Chinese articles, you should have a good chance to come across character “把(bǎ)”. It’s a character that can be used both as noun and a help character with other verb. As a help character, it is the keyword to form a certain sentence pattern.

As noun, it can be used as the following two meanings (as explained in Wiktionary):

1. measure word for anything that can be held in one’s hand (sān bǎ dāo) 三把刀: three knives
2. handle (normally used with other characters to combine into new word), such as:
   (bǎ wò) 把握: grasp

This is straight forward. The difficult part for this character lays in its usage with verb. Let’s move on with new words of this lesson first:

bǎ	dēng	guān
把 (helping verb)	灯 (light)	关 (turn off)
1. L10-ba	2. L10-deng	3. L10-guan
qián	diū	zuàn jiè
钱 (money)	丢 (lose)	钻戒 (diamond ring)
4. L10-qian	5. L10-diu	6. L10-zuan-jie
rēng xiàng	dà hǎi	fàng dào
扔向 (throw to)	大海 (sea)	放到 (put down, place on)
7. L10-reng-xiang	8. L10-da-hai	9. L10-fang-dao
zhuō shàng
桌上 (on the table)
10. L10-zhuo-shang