Everyday Essentials日常
Core verbs, adjectives and particles that glue sentences together.
This path collects the characters that hold every Chinese sentence together — the ones too common to belong to any single theme. 的 tops the frequency chart for the entire written language: it marks possession the way apostrophe-s does in English (我的 — mine). 是 (to be), 有 (to have), 不 and 没 (the two flavors of 'not') form the skeleton of nearly every statement you'll ever make or read.
None of these characters is glamorous, and that's precisely their value: at roughly 50% text coverage, the HSK 1 set only works because these glue characters appear in almost every sentence. Learn them early and every example sentence on this site becomes half-readable at once. They also star in the two most useful particles for a beginner: 吗, which turns any statement into a question, and 呢, which bounces a question back — 你呢? And you?