的 (pīnyīn: de / Components: ⿰ 白 + 勺) is the most used character in Mandarin Chinese and that is because it has a lot of meanings. It can be the possessive particle (like the ‘s in English), it can be a character you put after adjectives, it can be a noun and it can mean things in Mandarin that can be lost in translation when you translate them into English.

However, the most common way you will see 的 being used by is when it’s used to replace relative pronouns. Don’t let these “technical terms” scare you away, it’s easier than you think. In English, relative pronouns are words like “which”, “that” and “who” that are used to reference something that was mentioned previously in the sentence.

Think about the sentence “The man who is dancing”. The relative pronoun (who) is referencing the noun “man”. In other words, “who” means “man”. It is called relative pronoun because its meaning is relative to whatever it is referencing to. It is a pronoun of relative meaning, not of objective meaning.

The problem is that in Mandarin there are no relative pronouns, at least they aren’t used in the same way as in English. If you were to translate “The man who is dancing” into Mandarin, there wouldn’t be a specific word that would stand for the “who” pronoun, like there would be if it were translated into German (der), French (qui) or Italian (che). What you would have is 的 being used instead, but that wouldn’t mean that 的 is the relative pronoun that would mean “who” in that phrase.

Explaining how it works is not that simple, because it will require you to start thinking and forming sentences in very weird ways. There are many ways to approach this and many places on the internet you can go to in order to find help in order to understand how this specific usage of 的 works, but I will explain it the way I feel to be the most intuitive way and the way I wish had been explained to me when I was learning about this stuff.

Again, look at the sentence “The man who is dancing”. First, we have to mentally separate it into two parts: the subject (the doer of the action) and what the subject is doing and then eliminate the relative pronoun. We get this:

Subject: man (eliminate the article in order to simplify the explanation)

What is being done: is dancing

Here’s a caveat: I am sure there are linguists out there who will say there are better and more exact ways to dissect this sentence, but the terminology here is irrelevant, only the logic matters. I’m trying to explain something here.

Now that we have stripped the sentence down, we have “Man is dancing”, which has a different meaning than the original one, but don’t pay attention to that. Now, to finally understand how this sentence would be formed in Mandarin, all you have to do is position the “What is being done” part before the subject and add 的 between them, like this: is dancing 的 man

This is the logic, how it is formed, now I will explain to you why it is the way it is.

Remember in the beginning when I said that 的 is sometimes put after adjectives? When you are forming sentences that in English would require a relative pronoun, try to see the “What is being done” part as a very long adjective that needs a 的 before the subject.

I know, this could be confusing, but “is dancing 的 man” is really not that different from simple phrases like “a blue car”, “a big house” and “the fast runner”. Ask yourself, if you were to rewrite these phrases, how would you? Well, that’s easy, because you could just rewrite them as “a car that is blue”, “a house that is big” and “the runner who is fast”. It’s the same message written in a more wordy manner.

This is all to say that “is dancing man” means basically “man who is dancing”. You can say “a blue car” and “a car that is blue” just as much as you can say “the man who is dancing” and “the is dancing man”. Granted, you can’t really say “the is dancing man”, not in English at least, but YOU HAVE TO say it like that in Mandarin because that is exactly how they word things. This is where the mind-bending part begins:

You like that movie that you saw? No, you liked that “you saw” 的 movie.

you saw? No, you liked that “you saw” 的 movie. The cake that your mother made is delicious? No, the “your mother made” 的 cake is delicious.

your mother made is delicious? No, the “your mother made” 的 cake is delicious. You met a person who won the lottery? No, you met a “won the lottery” 的 person.

won the lottery? No, you met a “won the lottery” 的 person. The assignment which your teacher asked for is too boring? No, the “your teacher asked for” 的 assignment is too boring.

The part between quotes is the part that would come before the 的, which would come before the subject. Watch the evolution:

Do you like the car which you bought?

you bought? Do you like you bought car? (relative pronoun and article gone and structure rearranged)

Do you like you bought 的 car ? (pretend you bought is an adjective)

? (pretend is an adjective) 你喜欢 你买的 车 吗？

Nǐ xǐhuān nǐ mǎi de chē ma ?

? Do you like you bought 的 car ? = Do you like the car you bought?

“The you bought car” therefore becomes “The car which you bought“. And that’s it, this is how you overcome the lack of relative pronouns in Mandarin: by treating everything that is being done as an adjective.

Have fun learning Chinese!