As a native Chinese speaker, I still learn a lot from Grace's channel. I never noticed such differences exist between one and two syllable versions of a word. Very interesting and informative video!
As someone who started studying mandarin two years ago, this particular question is one I had for very long and couldn't get an answer to. Eventually I sort of figured it out by myself, so it's nice to know that I was mostly right. I will share this video with anyone who's starting to learn this language.
Yes, many Chinese learners have this question, but it's hard to get a precise answer because choosing between one and two-syllable words involves a lot of different factors. I'm impressed you figured it out yourself! That's awesome!
I figured this out too, even though I wasn't intentionally learning Chinese. I just kind of picked it up by watching many Chinese dramas. I kind of noticed it in most of their dialogues. 😂
As a native speaker, this blew my mind. Didn't realise I was speaking in a rhythm unconsciously. Once you used 3 syllables in the example, it just sounded so wrong.
Wow, this is an amazing lesson. As a half native speaker, I've sometimes struggled to understand or even explain to people about when and why to use single-syllabled and double-syllabled words, because sometimes I do use the single syllable words when I'm writing poems, and I never understood this flexibility which doesn't seem to be the case for most other languages. I love your lessons as a traditional Chinese writing user, always learning something new even when I'm already a Mandarin speaker. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. 😊
I'm learning mandarin but I'm also really interested in the language linguistically so your channel is perfect, I really like that you go into detail about the linguistics behind the language and not just give "practical" language information
In Japanese and Korean, they also use many Chinese two-syllable words and pronounce these in Sino-Japanese / Sino-Korean reading. When using as monosyllabic words, the words aren't usually not pronounced the Sino way but native words are used instead of Chinese loan pronunciation.
I think that's one of the key factors that make me like chinese a lot: even if your vocabulary is not fully developed, you can speak and be understood, you will just be less precise
@@IceCenders I think not the same historical reasons but rather it's the nature of the language itself. Yes, there are many homonyms in Thai as well, but they occur due to borrowings from Pali, Sanskrit and Khmer, etc, of which these words are supposed to sound different but end up having same pronunciation because of lack of some sounds in the Thai sound system.
@@benzvd It's a shame, it's such a beautiful language! I feel like if one goes to live in a foreign country it's only fair to try to learn at least the basics. Personally, as I'm learning Mandarin right now, later I want to learn another tonal language. :) Is it "easy" for foreigners (from Western Europe in my case) to go live in Thailand? I never entertained the notion, and I don't know how hard it is.
This is one of the smart video I have ever seen. You cannot image how much we love you and how deep we respect you Grace. You make Chinese language become more interesting and adorable.❤❤❤❤❤
Only in mandarin, as the tones in Mandarin is limited, resulting in many homophones. Cantonese still have mainly one character word. Which is why we have a special word for 2 characters word "词语".
You’re right!For example,no matter is 怕 or 害怕,we only use 驚 this character in Hokkien,Hakka and Cantonese.美 and美麗,using 靚 in Hakka and Cantonese,using媠 in hokkien.石,食,十,時 four characters all have different pronunciation.
Mandarin has no 入聲 huge different from Classical Chinese They use two character word instead of one characters word to avoid confusion E.g. use 漂亮 instead of 靚；use 桌子instead of 枱 And as they claim they are official language, they will say the above usage is wrong.
Mandarin is heavily influenced by Machurian and Mongolian languages hence the loss of ending sound inventory and tones. Not only Cantonese preserves the classical pronunciation so not all the words sound like ‘shiˊ’, the same goes for Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and other Chinese languages.
I feel that rhythm part is pretty important, for just a common example it’s common to hear 别忘了 or 不要忘记了，but not as common to hear 别忘记 and especially not common to hear 不要忘
Oh my Grace, how talented you are for teaching Chinese in such an efficient fashion! Your content is the best ever so far, I reckon. So logical and informative 👍
It's amazing how you use interesting way to teach this! As a Chinese tutor and also speaker (Mandarin is my second language), I realised there are so many things in Chinese language that tricky to teach. For example like word "就“, many of my students ask for the meaning in our first language (Indonesian), I went straightly to your channel to explain in a fun way. 多谢你啦, Grace! 🙏🏻💛
Great video, thanks! The fourth was my nightmare question for some time when I began to learn Chinese, but I also quite figured it out... I used to use the 1+2 or 2+1 combo, but I watched tons of c dramas and I (my ears), let's say, began to sense or feel how it really works... Finally I got a clear answer, thank you, was really great to hear those infos... Will share them!🤗
7:45 i Think what's wrong here is that dangling 学 is begging, begging for a compliment, an object "he doesn't like study" would also be incorrect for the same reason! we could say "he doesn't like studying" or "he doesn't like to study law" or even (barely, it still wants some object but is less wrong) "he doesn't like to study" [in general is the impled compliment] GREAT VIDEO AND YOU LOOK WONDERFUL!
谢谢 I am still very much a beginner, and I found this fascinating. I had indeed wondered why sometimes a word was shorter or longer in different texts. I suspected some of the reasons you have explained here, but definitely not all of them!
Thanks as always! Yeah, I’ve definitely wondered about the exact differences between the one and two syllable versions of word. It’s tricky but fascinating too, especially the part about rhythm. I haven’t heard of any other languages that use rhythm this way except in poetry or lyrics🤔 Very interesting and informative!
Thank you. This is very helpful for a confused American 老外 that visits Taiwan regularly with my Taiwanese wife. I practice every day and try to get better but sometimes the struggle is too real haha 😓. I appreciate videos like these that help explain the little things.
Before this video as an elementary level student I have really been struggling with this topic of sometimes encountering the same words in one or two syllable form and wondering why that is. Thank you so much Grace for this explanation!
thank you for the great explanation, as always! ♥︎ as someone who needs things to be very clear and specific, i love chinese! it’s one of the bigger reasons i’m learning. also, as an artist i’m quite particular to writing and script; so the chinese characters are fun 😁 i’m interested in chinese culture, and i have a couple of chinese friends with whom i’d love to be able to communicate with in their native language. just a few among the many reasons i love east asian languages in general.
Super useful video. This is something I notice all the time while studying, but never knew the reason why 1 or 2 syllable words were used. I just thought it was to be faster, more casual, or more natural sounding.
Thanks, Grace!!! You are a lifesaver... I'm a translator, and learning Chinese to add it to my portfolio. I'm focusing a lot on the grammatical issues and needed some clarification on this matter.
This is so interesting. I'm a speaker of Japanese and Japanese language inherited these two character words from Chinese when Chinese characters were adopted. It's what the Japanese call "jukugo" (熟語) The same way in Japanese also has verbs comprised of one single Chinese character (accompanied with the Japanese kana to express grammatical tense) and compound verbs comprised by a two-character word plus the word "suru", which transform the noun into a verb and usually the two-character version tends to be used in more formal situations.
Shi Shi Shi, Ask Andy recently had an episode where he explained the need for Chinese Characters. He brought up a document from when they were looking to get rid of the characters, The whole story is Shi repeated over and over with different intonations. The story of the poet who liked to eat lions.
Great video explanation. Thanks for your video. Including info on bound form characters might help as well. Maybe even explaining 词根，后缀（房子）, 前缀 （阿姨）。Maybe explain an example like 蝴蝶 (butterfly)。
I’ve recently found your channel in my adventures learning Chinese and I’ve found your content extensively helpful! Thanks so much for all your hard work putting these together ❤
When I was in the Southern US, I found a similar tendency to use two-part words in English. Southern US English makes many of their vowels sound almost identical. So in the North, we may say "pan", "pen", or "pin" and be clear. In the South, they all seem to be pronounced as "pee-uhn". So they needed to say "frahn pee-uhn" (frying pan), "eenk pee-uhn" (ink pen) or "steek pee-uhn" (stick pin) to differentiate. The added word clarified things for a dialect that had lost a lot of vowel differentiation. Ditto with Mandarin: its entire set of possible syllables will fit on one page!!! so one needs help to clarify -- especially for those non-natives who still don't hear tones very well! ;-)
Thank you! That's one of the biggest questions that bothered me when I started to learn Chinese. Although I'm starting to build my own vague understanding how words are formed, your video is excellent and explains many things very well.
Following 2+2 harmony it's time to do it with surnames (+names) 1 surname from father, 1 from mother, instead of 1+2. That can be nice and make a person more unique, because 3 characters for so many people are very few and the amount of people named the same is way more than if we add mothers surname /mother
Wow, beautiful girl with amazing lesson. From a native Vietnamese speaker the language have huge impact from Chinese, we have same way to use one syllable and two syllable word. But we have a lot of sound to read 漢字, in example you use, 時 thời, 十 thập, 食 thực, 石 thạch. We completely understand when say those words. Yeah, in fact that today Vietnamese dont use 漢字 to write but we miss deeper meaning in single Chinese character.
Extraordinary! So much information, and so well-explained! Little skits, diagrams, examples -- everything works very well. 我的母语不是中文但我在学习。我还是翻译。我还不能用中文思考。
I feel sites like Duolingo usually teach us two syllables. But when you listen to people speak, they often say only one syllable. It ends up probably making many foreigners sound awkward when we're speaking as we will use the two characters that we learned.
In karbi language we use prefix and suffix to indicate the differences of homophones. Eg, kèng can be mean leg or straight so to differentiate between them we use' a' in leg but if it has personal pronoun in then we do not use' a' and for straight we use pa,che,ke to indicate difference of uses.
In more written form authors sometimes like to stylize the language a bit to make it look classical. Another thing is that this 1+1 thing kinda bloats the vocabulary by generating huge number of synonyms for each thing. I keep track of all words I learned (through Anki) and I wrote a script that generates new vocabulary lists for texts based on my Anki deck and they're always filled with entries that are like 天色 which seem new while being easy to figure out. It's nothing big, but it just makes Chinese vocabulary look more intimidating than it is.
Thanks for the insight! It's great that you're using tools like Anki to help you learn and track your progress. I'm sure your efforts will pay off in the long run!
Useful thanks. Btw "move" means ban jia. "I'm moving next week." There’s no "move place" and furthermore "move home" means you weren’t living at home but now you will be (usually back to your parents' home from living at college). English is also tricky (so is every language).
I like to call those additional characters "dummies", for example 子 is a very common dummy as in 鞋子 or 袋子, i.e. it doesn't add any meaning, it's just there to help solve the homophone problem. And what you haven't mentioned is that many of those one-syllable words cannot really be used on their own anymore.
Thank you for the understandable and helpful video. To be honest, I always have problems with this topic. I could get along with it just fine, but at least as far as my textbooks are concerned, I don't think it's given enough importance. I study with the HSK Standard Course textbooks and the vocabulary always lists the 2-syllable vocabulary. I learn them accordingly. That means, for example, I learn 忘记 as a 2-syllable word. In the listening comprehension, however, they often use the 1-syllable form. I am not prepared for this because I have learned 忘记 and not just 忘. In reading exercises, it's less bad, but also often confusing. I would appreciate it very much if both forms were given. Usually my teacher only brings it to my attention when there is a grammatical difference that needs to be noted. Like you said in the video, if a form can only be a noun, for example.
Grace add this to your list China’s people are from monolingual areas, like BeiJing, and bilingual areas like Shanghai or Guangdong. A child in Guangdong is likely to speak Cantonese and Mandarin will not be his Mother tongue I have noticed Chinese from areas which speak Mandarin as a native language tend to use more single syllable words. Chinese from areas where Mandarin is not their home language tend to use two syllables Examples: proud “Au” in BeiJing but “Jiao Au” in Shanghai Salt. “Yan” in BeiJing but “Yan ba” in Shanghai. Chinese from areas where Mandarin is not the native language tend to be more patient with American students because they remember the challenges of learning Mandarin as a second language
I thought that the evolution of bigrams was due to the fact that Chinese originated as a picture language, with each picture having a single syllable. You can only have so many pictures before things get unmanageable (e.g. you can have a clear picture for "fish", but how do you have a picture for "salmon" or "trout" that are clearly different from each other?). To solve this, pictures were re-combined as sound components with the meaning component of other pictures. This hugely expanded the range of meanings categorized under a meaning component, but led to very many homophones. Although the meaning was clear in the written language, it was completely unclear in the spoken language, which explains the evolution of bigrams. It also explains the evolution of tones, and of phonetic drift - all 3 are a means of disambuguation.
Good video overall👍, except the slide at 7:45 seems a bit misleading. 学习 is a common use for learning. However, 学 and 习 are literally two different but related things: 学 (learning), 习 (practicing). The real meaning of "学习" is actually learn and practice. “学而时习之”, learn and keep practicing it , which is one of the wisdom from ancient Chinese. You won't really learn things if you don't practice it. So "学是一件很重要的事" is a legit sentence meaning learning is an important thing. Same for 他不喜欢学. Although modern Chinese don't usually say "he doesn't like learning" in this way, it is still legit in certain context: 我叫他学开车，他不喜欢学 -- I tell him to learn driving, (but) he doesn't like learning (it). I think that also brings up another aspect of Why Chinese Needs Two Syllable Word: to comprehend and/or enhance the context of words. A similar example would be "喜" and "欢".
This is more a mandarin problem than with other Chinese languages and dialects. Usually languages get more complex as time moves on to express more complex meanings or added loandwords but for some reason, mandarin became excessively simplified. It's also the "youngest" language in the sino family yet feels far more primitive. It's like cutting out half the letters or more of the alphabet in English and still trying to express the same language. The number of unique syllables in Mandarin is extremely small, only a few hundred at most, whereas other languages have thousands or tens of thousands. You can't factor in tones to increase that number either, as many regional versions of mandarin have differing tones so you subconsciously ignore the tones altogether in a mixed accent setting, not to mention they frequently drop tones in half the characters. It's been compared multiple times before, but the second most popular Chinese language, Cantonese, has probably 5x if not more syllable sounds in aggregate, plus more tones. There is frequently no need for disyllabic words in spoken Cantonese as single syllable words are typically well differentiated. In the example given in the video, 食, 石, 時 are all shi2 shi2 shi2 but in Cantonese are sik6, sek6, si4. Mandarin shi sounds are notorious for how many homophones there are. Cantonese also has problems with shi homophones, but not in the most common words. The most DRAMATIC ones come from the ju sound in mandarin like in 居然 or 京劇, with literally over a dozen different sounds in cantonese simplified into ju in mandarin. It's quite baffling that these are supposedly similar languages sometimes. Like getting a small box of crayons, removing 80% of them, and expecting two people to draw the same picture. That's why disyllabic words exist in mandarin. Because otherwise they would be utterly confused without the secondary aid. It gets worse when you try to recite prose or poetry, especially classical texts, as literary Chinese has far more vocabulary than spoken, and it all sounds the same with mandarin phonetics. There's a reason why every Chinese program has subtitles, even though mandarin has been universally used and taught as the chief language in public schools for decades. When they start throwing scientific terms, literary words, or just basic tone-shifting mandarin accents, you will start losing people. And I think Grace is confusing the disyllabic words that double up two characters with the same meaning like 害怕 and 健康 without adding anything useful, and compound words like 書包, which combine the meaning of two different things. 書包 sounds like a direct translation of the English bookbag, which also is a compound word, so they are not unique to Chinese. It's the "doubling up" words that seem a bit nonsensical and redundant, and are such a huge part of the language. There are some in English, which I can't think of off the top of my head, that are mostly informal and used for emphasis or as trendy buzzwords.
You’re a bit confused. Mandarin in terms of grammar is as complex as other Chinese varieties. Loanwords as you mentioned have nothing to do with a language’s phonology. In many cases, languages actually become more simple over time, in terms of grammar and phonology. For example, Latin is more complex phonologically and grammatically compared to Italian. Sometimes the phonology of a language will change drastically in a few centuries. That’s what happened to French and Korean too. Mandarin phonology is definitely more simple compared to southern dialects. That’s why I wish modern Chinese uses Cantonese or Hokkien pronunciation rather than Mandarin.
French vs. Italian (or Spanish). There you go for a European comparison. Although French still has more possible syllabic variations than Mandarin, it lost a lot (and increased the number of homophones) when they stopped pronouncing the syllable codas, especially since the language is full of monosyllabic words (similarly to English).
@@Whatever94-i4u was just gonna comment the same thing, with the syllable simplification, you find the need to get more and more supportin words to convey ur point and get monstrocities like "qu'est-ce-que" being one word pronounced like keskuh
Mandarin has way more multi-sylliable words than Cantonese because Mandarin has fewer tones and fewer finals. Remember the table that people use when they first learn Mandarin? It's a table of the combination of initials, finals and tones. Fewer finals and tones means less total combination of possible "sounds" in Mandarin and this thus explains why Mandarin relies more on multi-sylliable words than Cantonese. Take the examples of - In Mandarin 害怕 vs In Cantonese 怕 - 米飯 vs 飯 - 麵條 vs 麵 - 車子 vs 車 - 美麗 vs 靚 Just to name a few.
omg here we go again. Look, there is no "youngest variety". In fact mandarin still retains the classical 不 negation that other varieties have lost. Mandarin is more rich in initial sounds (zh, ch, sh, z, c, s) while southern varieties are more rich in ending sounds (-k, -p, -t). It's true that mandarin has a lot of homophones, but so does Japanese and they still get their point across right? Your argument sounds like politics more than anything else
Thank you very much for clarifying this topic. For me, 忘记 was an example. I've learned the HSK vocab including 忘记 and then I ran over the single 忘, struggling, before realizing, that 忘 is used alone with the same meaning. Is there somewhere a list of most common one/two character word pairs, so one could learn them together? With luck, one can find the meaning of the parts, but this does not help whether the part is used alone.
It's counterintuitive to me for two syllables to be preferred in writing. Writing is precisely where homophones are easily disambiguated, and it's more work to add characters
This explanation helps so much! I've been learning Mandarin on Duolingo, but what I learn and sometimes translate on Google isn't what I'm hearing when I watch C-dramas w/subtitles(something I recently got into) which makes it so confusing.
Duolingo is a good starting point, but you definitely need to mix in real world immersion. Duo can be pretty robotic and outdated if you are aiming for a real-world interaction level of understanding.
Very informative and well presented video! Thank you! Concerning the rhythm, Duanmu is a researcher that has published about this (if I remember his name correctly).
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
As a native Chinese speaker, I still learn a lot from Grace's channel. I never noticed such differences exist between one and two syllable versions of a word. Very interesting and informative video!
But i don't learn anything
Native speaker in America?
@@Givenexample123then?
我已經住在台灣十五年了，但是關於這個主題， 這是我第一次聽到那麼清除的解釋，謝謝老師
As someone who started studying mandarin two years ago, this particular question is one I had for very long and couldn't get an answer to. Eventually I sort of figured it out by myself, so it's nice to know that I was mostly right. I will share this video with anyone who's starting to learn this language.
Yes, many Chinese learners have this question, but it's hard to get a precise answer because choosing between one and two-syllable words involves a lot of different factors. I'm impressed you figured it out yourself! That's awesome!
The same here! But I have been learning Mandarin for just a year!
I figured this out too, even though I wasn't intentionally learning Chinese. I just kind of picked it up by watching many Chinese dramas. I kind of noticed it in most of their dialogues. 😂
Oh my, I've been waiting 30 years to clarify this. 😂❤
As a native speaker, this blew my mind. Didn't realise I was speaking in a rhythm unconsciously. Once you used 3 syllables in the example, it just sounded so wrong.
Wow, this is an amazing lesson. As a half native speaker, I've sometimes struggled to understand or even explain to people about when and why to use single-syllabled and double-syllabled words, because sometimes I do use the single syllable words when I'm writing poems, and I never understood this flexibility which doesn't seem to be the case for most other languages.
I love your lessons as a traditional Chinese writing user, always learning something new even when I'm already a Mandarin speaker. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. 😊
I’m sorry but it’s not just poems, you guys native speakers use one syllable words in daily life too 😭
I'm learning mandarin but I'm also really interested in the language linguistically so your channel is perfect, I really like that you go into detail about the linguistics behind the language and not just give "practical" language information
In Japanese and Korean, they also use many Chinese two-syllable words and pronounce these in Sino-Japanese / Sino-Korean reading. When using as monosyllabic words, the words aren't usually not pronounced the Sino way but native words are used instead of Chinese loan pronunciation.
I think that's one of the key factors that make me like chinese a lot: even if your vocabulary is not fully developed, you can speak and be understood, you will just be less precise
This concept also applies to Thai language
Afraid กลัว = หวาดกลัว, เกรงกลัว
Forget ลืม = หลงลืม
Learn เรียน = เรียนรู้
Is it for the same historical reasons? Are there too many homonyms in Thai as well?
@@IceCenders I think not the same historical reasons but rather it's the nature of the language itself.
Yes, there are many homonyms in Thai as well, but they occur due to borrowings from Pali, Sanskrit and Khmer, etc, of which these words are supposed to sound different but end up having same pronunciation because of lack of some sounds in the Thai sound system.
@@benzvd Thank you, that's super interesting! Thai is on my bucket list of languages I want to learn before I die ^^
@@IceCenders thank you
Many foreigners here don't want to learn it even if they live here all their life
@@benzvd It's a shame, it's such a beautiful language! I feel like if one goes to live in a foreign country it's only fair to try to learn at least the basics.
Personally, as I'm learning Mandarin right now, later I want to learn another tonal language. :)
Is it "easy" for foreigners (from Western Europe in my case) to go live in Thailand? I never entertained the notion, and I don't know how hard it is.
This is one of the smart video I have ever seen. You cannot image how much we love you and how deep we respect you Grace. You make Chinese language become more interesting and adorable.❤❤❤❤❤
Only in mandarin, as the tones in Mandarin is limited, resulting in many homophones. Cantonese still have mainly one character word. Which is why we have a special word for 2 characters word "词语".
Cool! It's interesting to learn that Cantonese still has mostly one-character words. Thank you for sharing this with us!
You’re right!For example,no matter is 怕 or 害怕,we only use 驚 this character in Hokkien,Hakka and Cantonese.美 and美麗,using 靚 in Hakka and Cantonese,using媠 in hokkien.石,食,十,時 four characters all have different pronunciation.
Mandarin has no 入聲 huge different from Classical Chinese
They use two character word instead of one characters word to avoid confusion
E.g. use 漂亮 instead of 靚；use 桌子instead of 枱
And as they claim they are official language, they will say the above usage is wrong.
Mandarin is heavily influenced by Machurian and Mongolian languages hence the loss of ending sound inventory and tones. Not only Cantonese preserves the classical pronunciation so not all the words sound like ‘shiˊ’, the same goes for Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and other Chinese languages.
The "rhythm of chinese" part is an eye opener! Many things make much more sense now lol. Thank you so much for the video!
I feel that rhythm part is pretty important, for just a common example it’s common to hear 别忘了 or 不要忘记了，but not as common to hear 别忘记 and especially not common to hear 不要忘
不要忘 听起来好凶…
"She wants what?! " I chuckled at the dramatisation. 😅
Thank you for the great explanation, as always
😂 haha I'm glad you found it entertaining! You're welcome!
Oh my Grace, how talented you are for teaching Chinese in such an efficient fashion! Your content is the best ever so far, I reckon. So logical and informative 👍
It's amazing how you use interesting way to teach this! As a Chinese tutor and also speaker (Mandarin is my second language), I realised there are so many things in Chinese language that tricky to teach. For example like word "就“, many of my students ask for the meaning in our first language (Indonesian), I went straightly to your channel to explain in a fun way. 多谢你啦, Grace! 🙏🏻💛
best explanation for this question i've ever seen!!
📝 For those of you who are learning Chinese with Zhuyin (bopomofo) system: gracemandarinchinese.com/why-chinese-needs-two-syllable-words/
Thanks for providing the Zhuyin, really appreciate the effort 讚！
xie xie
@@ThreeKingdoms- bú kè qì :)
@@GraceMandarinChinesewhat happened to xiaolu?
這個影片真的很厲害。謝謝郭老師！
ahhh Grace! i have been wondering this for a long time! thanks for making this video!
Your skits are fantastic
Great video, thanks! The fourth was my nightmare question for some time when I began to learn Chinese, but I also quite figured it out... I used to use the 1+2 or 2+1 combo, but I watched tons of c dramas and I (my ears), let's say, began to sense or feel how it really works...
Finally I got a clear answer, thank you, was really great to hear those infos... Will share them!🤗
I've heard people say 赏/賞 风景 (9:51) before, which is a 1+2 combo. Probably in more colloquial settings
Grace, please make more video like this, it is informative and helpful. Thank you so much for what you have been doing for us, Chinese learners.
7:45 i Think what's wrong here is that dangling 学 is begging, begging for a compliment, an object
"he doesn't like study" would also be incorrect for the same reason! we could say "he doesn't like studying" or "he doesn't like to study law" or even (barely, it still wants some object but is less wrong) "he doesn't like to study" [in general is the impled compliment] GREAT VIDEO AND YOU LOOK WONDERFUL!
Thank you for sharing your perspective! I'm glad you liked the video! 🥳
谢谢 I am still very much a beginner, and I found this fascinating. I had indeed wondered why sometimes a word was shorter or longer in different texts. I suspected some of the reasons you have explained here, but definitely not all of them!
学习中文很有趣，请享用 :)
I have been waiting for this topic for 6 years now. Thank you teacher Grace
Thanks as always! Yeah, I’ve definitely wondered about the exact differences between the one and two syllable versions of word. It’s tricky but fascinating too, especially the part about rhythm. I haven’t heard of any other languages that use rhythm this way except in poetry or lyrics🤔 Very interesting and informative!
You can’t use rhytm this way if you don’t have one and two syllable versions of almost every word.
@@BaranauskoYou can, if there are enough different synonyms. "Appreciate / the scenery" 4+4 syllables. "Enjoy / the view" 2+2 syllables.
Thank you. This is very helpful for a confused American 老外 that visits Taiwan regularly with my Taiwanese wife. I practice every day and try to get better but sometimes the struggle is too real haha 😓. I appreciate videos like these that help explain the little things.
Before this video as an elementary level student I have really been struggling with this topic of sometimes encountering the same words in one or two syllable form and wondering why that is. Thank you so much Grace for this explanation!
I’ve been following your channels (YT & IG) for the past 3 years, and the content and style keeps getting more awesome. 很厉害啊👍🏼❤
谢谢您，老师。很有意思。我觉得汉语是世界上最好听的语言之一，我非常喜欢。
thank you for the great explanation, as always! ♥︎
as someone who needs things to be very clear and specific, i love chinese! it’s one of the bigger reasons i’m learning. also, as an artist i’m quite particular to writing and script; so the chinese characters are fun 😁 i’m interested in chinese culture, and i have a couple of chinese friends with whom i’d love to be able to communicate with in their native language. just a few among the many reasons i love east asian languages in general.
You're welcome! ✨ I'm glad you're enjoying learning Chinese!
That video touched an interesting topic. I always thought chinese only relys on tones to distinguish homophones.
謝謝你！我喜歡這個視頻 :)
Thank you so much! Grace is the best chinese teacher in youtube all of time!
I was puzzled as to why there were 1 and 2 syllable words and this explanation is excellent.
I rarely take the time to comment on videos but this is truly an amazing lesson, thank you so much :)
🥰🥰
Super useful video. This is something I notice all the time while studying, but never knew the reason why 1 or 2 syllable words were used. I just thought it was to be faster, more casual, or more natural sounding.
Thanks, Grace!!! You are a lifesaver... I'm a translator, and learning Chinese to add it to my portfolio. I'm focusing a lot on the grammatical issues and needed some clarification on this matter.
Great explanation! Thanks for breaking the "mandarin code" to us
This is so interesting. I'm a speaker of Japanese and Japanese language inherited these two character words from Chinese when Chinese characters were adopted. It's what the Japanese call "jukugo" (熟語)
The same way in Japanese also has verbs comprised of one single Chinese character (accompanied with the Japanese kana to express grammatical tense) and compound verbs comprised by a two-character word plus the word "suru", which transform the noun into a verb and usually the two-character version tends to be used in more formal situations.
Shi Shi Shi,
Ask Andy recently had an episode where he explained the need for Chinese Characters. He brought up a document from when they were looking to get rid of the characters, The whole story is Shi repeated over and over with different intonations. The story of the poet who liked to eat lions.
Thank you so much, I was wondering about this lately and now you explained it :)
Thank you very much Grace, it had puzzled me but you made it much clearer.
Wow. This makes so much sense because you explained this so clearly! Thank you 😊
Thank you for sharing this, as a Mandarin teacher I have also learn a lot from you channel:) 谢谢
不客氣～我們一起加油💪
8:07 that's counterintuitive since writing seems to be less ambiguous because the characters are different
It was nice to see you quoting from the Classic of Poetry. I would have enjoyed hearing you read that couplet aloud.
Thanks, as always, Grace for another great vid! See you next time!
Great. I understand the reason for Two Syllable Words now. I can talk about this and share this video with my the friends who ask why.
Great video explanation. Thanks for your video. Including info on bound form characters might help as well. Maybe even explaining 词根，后缀（房子）, 前缀 （阿姨）。Maybe explain an example like 蝴蝶 (butterfly)。
I'm glad you liked the video and thank you for the suggestion! :)
Grace, thank you for posting this informative video. Your explanations and examples are extremely clear. Well done!
謝謝郭老師那麼仔細地解釋, two syllable nouns for animals are most interesting, like 火雞，河馬，熊貓，etc. German does this too, combining two words to make a new meaning.
I’ve recently found your channel in my adventures learning Chinese and I’ve found your content extensively helpful! Thanks so much for all your hard work putting these together ❤
When I was in the Southern US, I found a similar tendency to use two-part words in English. Southern US English makes many of their vowels sound almost identical. So in the North, we may say "pan", "pen", or "pin" and be clear. In the South, they all seem to be pronounced as "pee-uhn". So they needed to say "frahn pee-uhn" (frying pan), "eenk pee-uhn" (ink pen) or "steek pee-uhn" (stick pin) to differentiate. The added word clarified things for a dialect that had lost a lot of vowel differentiation.
Ditto with Mandarin: its entire set of possible syllables will fit on one page!!! so one needs help to clarify -- especially for those non-natives who still don't hear tones very well! ;-)
Very nice Sharing
Good work
God bless you 😊💕
Thank you! That's one of the biggest questions that bothered me when I started to learn Chinese. Although I'm starting to build my own vague understanding how words are formed, your video is excellent and explains many things very well.
Following 2+2 harmony it's time to do it with surnames (+names) 1 surname from father, 1 from mother, instead of 1+2.
That can be nice and make a person more unique, because 3 characters for so many people are very few and the amount of people named the same is way more than if we add mothers surname /mother
Wow, beautiful girl with amazing lesson. From a native Vietnamese speaker the language have huge impact from Chinese, we have same way to use one syllable and two syllable word. But we have a lot of sound to read 漢字, in example you use, 時 thời, 十 thập, 食 thực, 石 thạch. We completely understand when say those words. Yeah, in fact that today Vietnamese dont use 漢字 to write but we miss deeper meaning in single Chinese character.
Extraordinary! So much information, and so well-explained! Little skits, diagrams, examples -- everything works very well.
我的母语不是中文但我在学习。我还是翻译。我还不能用中文思考。
I feel sites like Duolingo usually teach us two syllables. But when you listen to people speak, they often say only one syllable. It ends up probably making many foreigners sound awkward when we're speaking as we will use the two characters that we learned.
In karbi language we use prefix and suffix to indicate the differences of homophones. Eg, kèng can be mean leg or straight so to differentiate between them we use' a' in leg but if it has personal pronoun in then we do not use' a' and for straight we use pa,che,ke
to indicate difference of uses.
basically, homophony makes things confusing so compound similar meaning words to reinforce them
Keep going Grace! You are amazing!
Great explanation, thank you!
Thank you for the video! You make Chinese less intimidating (and more fun!)
Clever presentation! Made me smile.
In more written form authors sometimes like to stylize the language a bit to make it look classical. Another thing is that this 1+1 thing kinda bloats the vocabulary by generating huge number of synonyms for each thing. I keep track of all words I learned (through Anki) and I wrote a script that generates new vocabulary lists for texts based on my Anki deck and they're always filled with entries that are like 天色 which seem new while being easy to figure out. It's nothing big, but it just makes Chinese vocabulary look more intimidating than it is.
Thanks for the insight! It's great that you're using tools like Anki to help you learn and track your progress. I'm sure your efforts will pay off in the long run!
Super informative and very well explained 谢谢!
beautiful and very clear explanation, I was able to guess some things but I needed more clarity, thanks!
Thanks Grace! It's a an interesting and useful video for me
That has been the question I have always wondered about.
Useful thanks. Btw "move" means ban jia. "I'm moving next week." There’s no "move place" and furthermore "move home" means you weren’t living at home but now you will be (usually back to your parents' home from living at college). English is also tricky (so is every language).
I like to call those additional characters "dummies", for example 子 is a very common dummy as in 鞋子 or 袋子, i.e. it doesn't add any meaning, it's just there to help solve the homophone problem. And what you haven't mentioned is that many of those one-syllable words cannot really be used on their own anymore.
Thank you for the understandable and helpful video.
To be honest, I always have problems with this topic.
I could get along with it just fine, but at least as far as my textbooks are concerned, I don't think it's given enough importance. I study with the HSK Standard Course textbooks and the vocabulary always lists the 2-syllable vocabulary. I learn them accordingly. That means, for example, I learn 忘记 as a 2-syllable word. In the listening comprehension, however, they often use the 1-syllable form. I am not prepared for this because I have learned 忘记 and not just 忘.
In reading exercises, it's less bad, but also often confusing.
I would appreciate it very much if both forms were given.
Usually my teacher only brings it to my attention when there is a grammatical difference that needs to be noted. Like you said in the video, if a form can only be a noun, for example.
This is so useful. Thanks!
I love Taiwan, I love traditional Chinese ❤❤ Thanks a lot for your lessons, Grace! ❤
Grace add this to your list
China’s people are from monolingual areas, like BeiJing, and bilingual areas like Shanghai or Guangdong. A child in Guangdong is likely to speak Cantonese and Mandarin will not be his Mother tongue
I have noticed Chinese from areas which speak Mandarin as a native language tend to use more single syllable words.
Chinese from areas where Mandarin is not their home language tend to use two syllables
Examples: proud “Au” in BeiJing but “Jiao Au” in Shanghai
Salt. “Yan” in BeiJing but
“Yan ba” in Shanghai.
Chinese from areas where Mandarin is not the native language tend to be more patient with American students because they remember the challenges of learning Mandarin as a second language
That was extremely insightful! Thanks a lot!
I thought that the evolution of bigrams was due to the fact that Chinese originated as a picture language, with each picture having a single syllable. You can only have so many pictures before things get unmanageable (e.g. you can have a clear picture for "fish", but how do you have a picture for "salmon" or "trout" that are clearly different from each other?). To solve this, pictures were re-combined as sound components with the meaning component of other pictures. This hugely expanded the range of meanings categorized under a meaning component, but led to very many homophones. Although the meaning was clear in the written language, it was completely unclear in the spoken language, which explains the evolution of bigrams. It also explains the evolution of tones, and of phonetic drift - all 3 are a means of disambuguation.
😂 Thank you! I was just wondering this. Here is your video. Perfect!
Great timing! 🥳
2:25 那兩個古人的英文說得不錯欸
Thank you! I learned a lot and it makes a lot of sense now!
Great explanation
Good video overall👍, except the slide at 7:45 seems a bit misleading.
学习 is a common use for learning. However, 学 and 习 are literally two different but related things: 学 (learning), 习 (practicing). The real meaning of "学习" is actually learn and practice. “学而时习之”, learn and keep practicing it , which is one of the wisdom from ancient Chinese. You won't really learn things if you don't practice it. So "学是一件很重要的事" is a legit sentence meaning learning is an important thing. Same for 他不喜欢学. Although modern Chinese don't usually say "he doesn't like learning" in this way, it is still legit in certain context: 我叫他学开车，他不喜欢学 -- I tell him to learn driving, (but) he doesn't like learning (it).
I think that also brings up another aspect of Why Chinese Needs Two Syllable Word: to comprehend and/or enhance the context of words. A similar example would be "喜" and "欢".
Excellent video. Thanks so much. Super helpful.
70 % of words in Chinese. This is worth a website bringing exhaustive list if such flexible words having one syllable version. Please help me find it
One syllable words are widely used in. 成语
This is more a mandarin problem than with other Chinese languages and dialects. Usually languages get more complex as time moves on to express more complex meanings or added loandwords but for some reason, mandarin became excessively simplified. It's also the "youngest" language in the sino family yet feels far more primitive. It's like cutting out half the letters or more of the alphabet in English and still trying to express the same language. The number of unique syllables in Mandarin is extremely small, only a few hundred at most, whereas other languages have thousands or tens of thousands. You can't factor in tones to increase that number either, as many regional versions of mandarin have differing tones so you subconsciously ignore the tones altogether in a mixed accent setting, not to mention they frequently drop tones in half the characters.
It's been compared multiple times before, but the second most popular Chinese language, Cantonese, has probably 5x if not more syllable sounds in aggregate, plus more tones. There is frequently no need for disyllabic words in spoken Cantonese as single syllable words are typically well differentiated. In the example given in the video, 食, 石, 時 are all shi2 shi2 shi2 but in Cantonese are sik6, sek6, si4. Mandarin shi sounds are notorious for how many homophones there are. Cantonese also has problems with shi homophones, but not in the most common words. The most DRAMATIC ones come from the ju sound in mandarin like in 居然 or 京劇, with literally over a dozen different sounds in cantonese simplified into ju in mandarin. It's quite baffling that these are supposedly similar languages sometimes. Like getting a small box of crayons, removing 80% of them, and expecting two people to draw the same picture. That's why disyllabic words exist in mandarin. Because otherwise they would be utterly confused without the secondary aid. It gets worse when you try to recite prose or poetry, especially classical texts, as literary Chinese has far more vocabulary than spoken, and it all sounds the same with mandarin phonetics. There's a reason why every Chinese program has subtitles, even though mandarin has been universally used and taught as the chief language in public schools for decades. When they start throwing scientific terms, literary words, or just basic tone-shifting mandarin accents, you will start losing people.
And I think Grace is confusing the disyllabic words that double up two characters with the same meaning like 害怕 and 健康 without adding anything useful, and compound words like 書包, which combine the meaning of two different things. 書包 sounds like a direct translation of the English bookbag, which also is a compound word, so they are not unique to Chinese. It's the "doubling up" words that seem a bit nonsensical and redundant, and are such a huge part of the language. There are some in English, which I can't think of off the top of my head, that are mostly informal and used for emphasis or as trendy buzzwords.
You’re a bit confused. Mandarin in terms of grammar is as complex as other Chinese varieties. Loanwords as you mentioned have nothing to do with a language’s phonology. In many cases, languages actually become more simple over time, in terms of grammar and phonology. For example, Latin is more complex phonologically and grammatically compared to Italian. Sometimes the phonology of a language will change drastically in a few centuries. That’s what happened to French and Korean too. Mandarin phonology is definitely more simple compared to southern dialects. That’s why I wish modern Chinese uses Cantonese or Hokkien pronunciation rather than Mandarin.
French vs. Italian (or Spanish). There you go for a European comparison. Although French still has more possible syllabic variations than Mandarin, it lost a lot (and increased the number of homophones) when they stopped pronouncing the syllable codas, especially since the language is full of monosyllabic words (similarly to English).
@@Whatever94-i4u was just gonna comment the same thing, with the syllable simplification, you find the need to get more and more supportin words to convey ur point and get monstrocities like "qu'est-ce-que" being one word pronounced like keskuh
Mandarin has way more multi-sylliable words than Cantonese because Mandarin has fewer tones and fewer finals. Remember the table that people use when they first learn Mandarin? It's a table of the combination of initials, finals and tones. Fewer finals and tones means less total combination of possible "sounds" in Mandarin and this thus explains why Mandarin relies more on multi-sylliable words than Cantonese.
Take the examples of
- In Mandarin 害怕 vs In Cantonese 怕
- 米飯 vs 飯
- 麵條 vs 麵
- 車子 vs 車
- 美麗 vs 靚
Just to name a few.
omg here we go again. Look, there is no "youngest variety". In fact mandarin still retains the classical 不 negation that other varieties have lost. Mandarin is more rich in initial sounds (zh, ch, sh, z, c, s) while southern varieties are more rich in ending sounds (-k, -p, -t). It's true that mandarin has a lot of homophones, but so does Japanese and they still get their point across right? Your argument sounds like politics more than anything else
Very useful and interesting video! 感谢 Grace! ^^
Thanks a lot!!! Very useful
Thank you for your teaching. I just want to start learning, which video should I start with?
非常好！😭😭😭❣️🤜🤛
I love your new background
Grace 老师 很好
Thank you very much for clarifying this topic. For me, 忘记 was an example. I've learned the HSK vocab including 忘记 and then I ran over the single 忘, struggling, before realizing, that 忘 is used alone with the same meaning.
Is there somewhere a list of most common one/two character word pairs, so one could learn them together?
With luck, one can find the meaning of the parts, but this does not help whether the part is used alone.
It's counterintuitive to me for two syllables to be preferred in writing. Writing is precisely where homophones are easily disambiguated, and it's more work to add characters
This explanation helps so much! I've been learning Mandarin on Duolingo, but what I learn and sometimes translate on Google isn't what I'm hearing when I watch C-dramas w/subtitles(something I recently got into) which makes it so confusing.
Duolingo is a good starting point, but you definitely need to mix in real world immersion. Duo can be pretty robotic and outdated if you are aiming for a real-world interaction level of understanding.
Fascinating!
Very informative and well presented video! Thank you!
Concerning the rhythm, Duanmu is a researcher that has published about this (if I remember his name correctly).
Extremely interesting, thanks a lot ! I especially liked the insight about rythm :)