User Comments - changye
changye
Posted on: Too Heavy!
March 2, 2009 at 6:17 AMThere are mainly two ways to say "heavy" in Chinese, one is 重 (zhong4), as shown in today's lesson, and other is 沉 (chen2), both of which are basically interchangeable when meaning something is physically heavy.
重 has a broader meaning than 沉, and it's also used for abstract things, like 病情很重 （the state of ilness is serious） and 很重的责任 (a heavy responsibility). The word "沉重", of course, means "heavy", and it's often used in abstract sense.
沉 is pronounced as "shen3" in the cases of a family name and the city 沈阳 （shen3yang2） in northeast China.
Posted on: Sorry and Thank You
March 2, 2009 at 5:44 AMHi bill
It's easy for me to imagine how the Chinese conversation of yours went at the restaurant in Paris. Actually Chinese is a very word-saving (or succinct) language, and natives often even leave out the subject from a sentence in conversation, just like 去吗？/去。But please be noted that instead native people usually speak a lot of things at high speed probably in order to compensate the brevity of their mother tongue, haha.
Posted on: Sorry and Thank You
March 2, 2009 at 3:37 AMHi xuchen
I agree. 而 is a mysterious, attractive and useful word for us learners. Native guys use it very naturally and effectively in their comments, but I still hasitate to use it in my Chinese comment, partly because 而 is a somewhat formal word. So please be noted that it's not commonly used in everyday conversation.
Posted on: Sorry and Thank You
March 2, 2009 at 3:23 AMHi bill
Let me show you another example about such difference between Chinese and English. I guess that English also has similar expressions that use "don't", though.
Feel yourself at home/Please feel free to ～
你别客气，请不要客气
Interestingly, Chinese people usually say "你太见外(or 客气)了" (without using 别/不要) when they mean "don't be reserved" or "don't treat me like a stranger". O fcourse, you can also say
Posted on: Sorry and Thank You
March 1, 2009 at 1:49 PMThere are some other ways to express apology in Chinese, although I don't know how frequently they are actually used by native guys, haha.
抱歉 （bao4qian4, adjective） 让您久等了，很抱歉。
I'm sorry to have kept you waiting.
道歉 （dao4qian4, verb, apologize） 我应该向老师道歉。
I have to apologize to my teacher.
I guess that 抱歉 is a little more serious/formal than 对不起. 道 means "say" in classical Chinese, just like the chengyu 说三道四 (make irresponsible remarks), so 道歉 literally means "express words of apology". Anyway, 对不起 is the most common (and easy) way to apologize in Chinese.
Posted on: Sorry and Thank You
March 1, 2009 at 11:02 AMHi christine30550
You can say "真可惜" in the situation. As for 谢谢 and 对不起, maybe Chinese people just want to save them for special occations, haha, or at least it may be said that 谢谢/对不起 mean more to Chinese than thank you/I'm sorry to westerners. And therefore, they usually don't sell them at a bargain price!
Posted on: Sorry and Thank You
March 1, 2009 at 8:44 AMHi adajsfksb
P/S. You can also use "不要" instead of "别", like 你不要伤心 or 你不要难过.
Posted on: Sorry and Thank You
March 1, 2009 at 8:04 AMHi light487
You've already mastered how to use 对不起，so it's worth remembering the word 对得起 (dui4deqi3) next, which means "not let someone down, live up to one's expectation".
只有努力学习，才对得起老师。
Posted on: Dreams of the Departed 陇西行
March 1, 2009 at 6:03 AMHi pgwilliams222
Actually there's no trick to my above comment. All you need are some Chinese character dictionaries (汉语字典). This time I looked up about ten dictionaries, including both classical and modern ones, and found a few useful tips in some of them, which was very entertaining for me. Having good dictionaries enables you to act like a "know-it-all", haha. Here are some online Chinese dictionaries, although I myself usually don't use them. I love hardbound dictionaries.
http://www.zdic.net/zd/ 汉语字典
http://tool.httpcn.com/dict_kx.html 康熙字典
http://chinese.dsturgeon.net/text.pl?node=26160&if=gb 说文解字
Posted on: Too Heavy!
March 2, 2009 at 7:06 AMSorry, correction.
沉 is pronounced as "shen3" in the cases of a family name and the city 沈阳 （shen3yang2） in northeast China.
In my above post about 沉, I made a mistake in the last paragraph. 沉 (chen2, heavy) and 沈 (shen3) are two different characters in modern Chinese. Confusingly enough, 沉 is the simlified form of the traditional character 沈, which is still used in Taiwan and Japan. To make things more confusing, the simplified character 沈's counterpart in traditional ones is 瀋. So please just forget it, haha.
Thanks for pointing that out, lichunhuan1998!