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. 😂
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
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.
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.❤❤❤❤❤
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 👍
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
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! 🙏🏻💛
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
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!🤗
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!
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.
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.
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!
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!
@@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.
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.
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 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)。
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.
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 ❤
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.
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! ;-)
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。
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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!
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.
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.
Too many homophones. To solve this problem. Use two syllable words. I came to this conclusion all by myself. Believe it or not. I am happy finally explains the exact same logic I figured out.😊
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".
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?
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. 😂❤
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 😭
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
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
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.
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.❤❤❤❤❤
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 👍
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.
The "rhythm of chinese" part is an eye opener! Many things make much more sense now lol. Thank you so much for the video!
"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!
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
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!!
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…
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
📝 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！
@@ThreeKingdoms- bú kè qì :)
@@GraceMandarinChinesewhat happened to xiaolu?
Thank you so much! Grace is the best chinese teacher in youtube all of time!
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.
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.
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.
Thank you very much Grace, it had puzzled me but you made it much clearer.
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!
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 :)
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 was puzzled as to why there were 1 and 2 syllable words and this explanation is excellent.
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.
I have been waiting for this topic for 6 years now. Thank you teacher Grace
這個影片真的很厲害。謝謝郭老師！
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.
Your skits are fantastic
I rarely take the time to comment on videos but this is truly an amazing lesson, thank you so much :)
🥰🥰
ahhh Grace! i have been wondering this for a long time! thanks for making this video!
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.
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👍🏼❤
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💪
Great explanation! Thanks for breaking the "mandarin code" to us
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! :)
It was nice to see you quoting from the Classic of Poetry. I would have enjoyed hearing you read that couplet aloud.
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.
Super informative and very well explained 谢谢!
Thank you so much, I was wondering about this lately and now you explained it :)
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 :)
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。
That has been the question I have always wondered about.
Clever presentation! Made me smile.
Keep going Grace! You are amazing!
Wow. This makes so much sense because you explained this so clearly! Thank you 😊
Thanks Grace! It's a an interesting and useful video for me
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 ❤
8:07 that's counterintuitive since writing seems to be less ambiguous because the characters are different
Grace, thank you for posting this informative video. Your explanations and examples are extremely clear. Well done!
basically, homophony makes things confusing so compound similar meaning words to reinforce them
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.
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! ;-)
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.
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.
Very nice Sharing
Good work
God bless you 😊💕
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。
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
Great explanation, thank you!
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.
Thanks, as always, Grace for another great vid! See you next time!
😂 Thank you! I was just wondering this. Here is your video. Perfect!
Great timing! 🥳
Thank you for the video! You make Chinese less intimidating (and more fun!)
beautiful and very clear explanation, I was able to guess some things but I needed more clarity, thanks!
I love Taiwan, I love traditional Chinese ❤❤ Thanks a lot for your lessons, Grace! ❤
Fascinating!
非常好！😭😭😭❣️🤜🤛
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! 🥳
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.
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.
That was extremely insightful! Thanks a lot!
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.
Thank you! I learned a lot and it makes a lot of sense now!
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
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.
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.
I loved this video.
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).
Extremely interesting, thanks a lot ! I especially liked the insight about rythm :)
Very useful and interesting video! 感谢 Grace! ^^
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).
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!
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.
Grace 老师 很好
Super useful and interesting video, thank you!! :)
2:25 那兩個古人的英文說得不錯欸
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.
Too many homophones. To solve this problem. Use two syllable words. I came to this conclusion all by myself. Believe it or not. I am happy finally explains the exact same logic I figured out.😊
One syllable words are widely used in. 成语
Hello....nice lecture....
Can you translate a convo in working of construction especially in plumbing workings...
Thank you....
I love your new background
開頭看到忘記以為要教偏義複詞，想說也太難，結果發現不是，然後又看到把詩經搬出來XD這下真的難了哈哈哈
哈哈哈 好險我沒有真的開始教詩經（？
Thank you for your teaching. I just want to start learning, which video should I start with?
damn, great video grace -- thank you
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".
Thank you teacher. This was a nagging question to me.