把

Today I learned about the "verb" ba (把).
It is an incredibly annoying piece of Chinese that really doesn't seem like a verb. It also reminds me of English a bit because there are exceptions to the rules on how and when to use it.
That's one of the reasons I love Chinese; there are rarely exceptions. Chinese is actually a very logical language and if you know the meaning of a couple characters, then you probably know a lot more words than you realize.
You would think this would make learning vocabulary easier because once you know a couple words, you can put them together and find out you already know how to write a couple other words. I, of course, find this extremely annoying. The reason being is because I always associate a character with a meaning- not the sound- because I know there are many characters sharing a single sound but not many share a meaning. This means that when I learn a new word I automatically assume new characters are involved but sometimes the word is actually two characters I already know put together!
For example:
My Chinese name is 白可文。
The first character in my name, 白, pronounced bai, means "white." However, when it's combined with another character like this (的) it's pronounced de and means to be in possession of. To say "my mom" in Chinese, you would say "I 的 mom" because the "de" makes the "I" possessive.
Another example would be the last character of my name, 文, pronounced wen and means "writing, culture, language." When I add the character 中, or zhong, which means "middle" to 文, I get zhongwen or 中文，which means "Chinese language."
Even more confusing is my middle character 可, which by itself is pronounced ke and means "but" like in a sentence. It also means "but" like this 可是, pronounced keshi, having added "to be" or 是 (shi) to it.
There's also this word, keneng, which is written as 可能 and means "possible" which has nothing to do with either meaning of the characters! 可 or ke means "but" and 能 or neng, means "to be able to." I suppose it kind of does but not really. So you can see how these characters just seem to pop up in places I don't expect sometimes.
Sometimes I think Japanese would have been easier... Then I remember I'd have to learn these characters anyway because Japanese or 日文 uses them. Then I decide I'll just stick with 中文.