"He"...can you use it? What time?
Lantian
June 26, 2007 at 08:57 AM posted in General DiscussionI find it interesting the distinction between basic, intermediate and advanced. I really think that frequency of use of words might be a good metric. Lower frequency words add interest and variety to speech.
I have no trouble expressing 'time' in Chinese,
你什么时候回来？
我不知道什么时候回来。
几点开始？
几号定了？
But the other day a friend of mine texted this to me, and I thought..how interesting. I understood everything, except for one character, although this didn't prevent me from understanding. It's the ‘何’ hanzi, he2.
It's like not a verb, adjective, and (to me) shows up in weird places in sentences.
明天去北京 不知 何时回。
I thought maybe some other' would find this intersting, maybe some Cpodders who are familiar with it could talk with me about it a bit.
Look forward to an upcoming lesson on it. Is it in any lessons?
(When will we be able to search by hanzi? 'he' has too many sound-a-likes to make the English search results useful.
tianfeng
June 26, 2007 at 04:18 PM
It is なに in Japanese. Sometimes people use it but it is rare. I have seen some people who are 哈日 who like to use it because they think it makes them sound cool.
guest
June 26, 2007 at 01:12 PM
何 by itself basically means 什么, but it seems most often encountered in compounds like 为何, 如何, 任何, which in spoken Chinese are generally replaced with other things (为什么, 怎么样, and 什么 (in some of its meanings), respectively).
To my totally non-expert ear, 何 sounds a bit stuffy when spoken, but lends an air of formality to written material.
Me, I'd use 啥 in that text message instead of 何, but that's just me :)
Lantian
June 26, 2007 at 09:14 AM
My apologies, looks like the search does do hanzi. I guess I would like the results to bore-into the actual dialogues and pull out that hanzi, it's a bother to go to each lesson and hunt and peck for it.
In the first search results, Advanced - 人口老龄化，
找不到’何‘，累死我。
daizi
June 26, 2007 at 04:50 PMOf course it's from classical Chiunese and is more common in written Chinese. But I've also heard it with 必 bì (何必 Why must...there is no need to...) as in 何必那么客气？Why so polite?