I am learning chinese. I want to know why the phrase, “a girl”, is ????. why four characters?
May 5, 2010 by
Filed under Learning Chinese
I have just BARELY started learning chinese, and if you would like to e-mail any other tips for a begginer, I would certaintly appreciate it! (I already know that it is a tonal language)
That means literally ‘one girl’. y? gè n? hái. yi ? means one, ge ? is like a quantity word, ?? means one of (…). Nu ? means female, and hai ? is child. ?? meaning girl. So i guess that’s why it’s so long, asian languages are structured differently to english. Good luck with the chinese learning, i quit last year it was too hard!
????
yi1 ge4 ni3 hai2
? yi1 = one
? ge4 = counter, combined it with numbers, it refers to counting of things, thus, 1? = one things, 3? = three things
? ni3 = female
? hai2 = to denote that, the person is teenager / child. thus ?? literally means female child, thus girl. or ?? (nan2 hai2) means boy, since ?(nan2) means male.
i am not entire sure why it is four charaters but
? means one
? means single
? mean female
? means child
female child = girl
they add ? because it describes one of what.
for example there is ???.
? meaning one
? meaning sheet
? meaning paper
so, ??? means one sheet of paper.
The structure Between English and Chinese is totally different, same like the grammer between English and Chinese.
In English ‘a’ mean ‘one’, so in Chinese is ‘??’, and ‘girl’ mean ‘??’ in Chinese. So that how ‘a girl’ in English’ translate into Chinese is ‘????’ .
?means’ one’
? is a collective noun
??-girl
It’s four characters because it IS.You can’t write it any shorter way and keep it grammatically correct.
To learn a kind of foreign language, you should accept the difference between our English and Chinese. Just think and speak it. Don’t ask why it is so different from our language. Start learning it as a baby does. Visit this site http://www.learnchinese.bj.cn/ ,maybe it can help you.
In Chinese, any numeral word that modifies a noun must be followed by a “measure word”, or so-called “classifier”. That is: measure words are OBLIGATORY with with enumeration of all count nouns.
just like when you are saying “a group of girl” (????), you are using the measure word “group”, which is almost the same case in Chinese. However, when it comes to “a girl”, you have to say “an individual of girl”(????). Here ? is a classifer just like words such as “group”, “flock” or “school”, which means “individual” or “a specimen”
?? is a two-character word, which literally means “female child”.
Remember, a Chinese character is just a MORPHEME(the smallest unit that could take on a certain meaning), not a word. In modern Chinese, most words comprise two characters, three characters, or even more
good luck