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What Block B was for, and a word about the next one
Twelve lessons in the southwest, and the grammatical business was precision of two kinds. First, degree: 得不行, 得要命, 得 plus a whole result clause in lesson 67, and the whole intensifier ladder in 77. Second, concession: 即使, 哪怕 and 就是……也 in 74, and the attitude adverbs 到底, 难道, 居然 and 反而 scattered through 66, 70 and 71. Plus two systems the course owed you — measure words as a set in 70, and the pronunciation rules for 一, 不 and consecutive third tones in 68. The content was doing something more specific than sightseeing. Sichuan and Yunnan are where a learner discovers that the Chinese they know is one register of one variety of one part of the country. Lesson 68 made that explicit about the sounds; 67 about what spicy even means; 69 about pace as a value people argue over; 71 about 面子, which is the machinery under a great deal of ordinary behaviour; and 76 about the fact that a fifth of Yunnan's population is not Han and has its own language. Alex's answer in 76 — 少说话，多看 — is the block's real conclusion, and it is advice this course will repeat. On your Chinese now. You have the whole complement system from Block A and the degree and concession apparatus from Block B, which is most of HSK 4's grammar. You can complain precisely, concede a point, press a question, grade an opinion and describe food, all of which are more useful than they sound. What you still cannot do is read a newspaper, follow two strangers talking to each other, or produce 成语 without risk — 72 was explicit about the last one. Block C goes to Guangdong and Hong Kong, and it is the block where Mandarin stops being a synonym for Chinese. Cantonese is not a dialect of Mandarin in any useful sense, it has its own written form, and it is the one variety whose speakers have not been switching to 普通话 — for reasons lesson 80 sets out. Traditional characters arrive in 81, Hong Kong's own written Chinese in 84, and Taiwan and Singapore in 87 and 88. After twelve lessons of hearing that Sichuanese is hard, the next twelve make the harder point: 中文 and 普通话 are not the same word, and it matters which you mean.