What *is* Grammar (academic question)

I would say that for most things for which you need to learn more than the word and the associated meaning, you can count that as a grammar point, at least in the context of a language podcast. Much to learn, we have.

But because many words in Chinese are of ambiguous nature regarding there word category (activity verb, achievement verb, noun, adjective,...), and often adhere to very individual usage restrictions, you end up with an annotated dictionary. Which would be fine to have of course. ;)

nice, isn't it? Chinesepod will never run out of grammar points. (though I have no idea what are those word categories you're talking about. haha)

Henning, When I first started the grammar tags (before there was a Grammar Guide), I took a structural approach, giving us "pattern tags" such as keyi + V or Adj + de hen. This form gave us tags which were very clearly grammar points, but there was a problem. Many people don't relate to grammar that way. They see it as "how do I use 可以" or "why does 很 come after the adjective here?" It seems that most people are more word-oriented in their approach to grammar. This reminded me of the best book on grammar I had ever used, a two volume series on Japanese grammar put out by the Japan Times. I decided to check it out again. Guess how they organized their grammar entries? By word. Organizing by word clearly causes a few problems, however. When a word appears in key grammar patterns then it needs to be covered, but what about a word with some strange grammatical properties? Well, in this system it can easily be covered as well. The problem is that there is no end to this game of inclusion, and if you don't know where to stop you end up starting a dictionary. In general, our approach is to only include words that require special grammatical attention. This is because the word is difficult to use, or easy to use incorrectly. If a word's usage can easily be picked up from a dictionary and swapping it out with a word of similar meaning creates no grammatical problems, then it probably does not belong in the Grammar Guide. I hope that clears things up. There may be a few tough calls here and there, but in general we will err on the side of inclusion to make the guide as comprehensive as possible.

John, thanks for youre explanation. It makes perfectly sense. In fact I prefer the word-approach myself. It has the additional benefit that it might one day even be interlinked with the glossary.

henning, Exactly! Don't think that it hasn't occurred to us... :)