{"id":8836,"date":"2016-12-18T20:59:46","date_gmt":"2016-12-18T20:59:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/?p=8836"},"modified":"2016-12-19T07:49:42","modified_gmt":"2016-12-19T07:49:42","slug":"looking-use-words-chinese-right-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/looking-use-words-chinese-right-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Looking up how to use words in Chinese the right way"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"looking-up-words-in-chinese\"<\/a>Looking up words is a fundamental part of learning a language. Even if you rely heavily on extensive reading<\/a> and listening, you will still need to look up unfamiliar words and characters now and then.<\/p>\n

Finding the meaning of an unfamiliar word is simple enough; just use the dictionary of your choice<\/a> and see what it says. Yes, converting printed text to a digital format is a bit tricky the first time and you need to know which dictionary to use for optimal results (Pleco<\/a>), but this really isn’t rocket science.<\/p>\n

Looking up how to express something in Chinese, however, only appears easy, but is in fact very hard. Most students I’ve met can’t do this properly, so I decided to write this article both to explain the problem and help provide a solution to it.<\/p>\n

Before I start, I want to mention that if you have a convenient way to get questions about language usage answered directly by a native speaker, this is much quicker than looking it up on your own. However, few people have that option all the time and there are other reasons why you might not want to do that. See my article about language question triage for more about this:<\/p>\n

Chinese language question triage: General guidelines<\/a><\/p>\n

Looking up how to say\/write something in Chinese<\/h3>\n

So, what do most students do when\u00a0they, in the process of writing a text in Chinese, stumble on something they don’t know how to express? They enter the word they want to express in English into a dictionary, look for the corresponding Chinese and finish their sentence. The problem is that this method almost never works, except for very simple nouns (and sometimes not even then).<\/p>\n

For comparison, when I translate things from English to Swedish, the above approach actually works well in perhaps 90% of the cases. The final sentence is often grammatically and idiomatically correct in Swedish.<\/p>\n

When translating from English to Chinese, however, the resulting sentence is almost never correct; 90% of sentences produced this way are actually incorrect or at least very awkward.<\/p>\n

Let’s look at an example. For this scenario, picture a student taking a writing course in Beijing*. In one assignment, the student is asked to introduce a company and its position on the market. Let’s say the student wants to convey the following:<\/p>\n

The smartphone market is very competitive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, the student first writes the general structure of the sentence along these lines:<\/p>\n

\u667a\u80fd\u624b\u673a\u7684\u5e02\u573a\u975e\u5e38…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Then he doesn’t know how to write “competitive”, looks it up in a dictionary and writes:<\/p>\n

\u667a\u80fd\u624b\u673a\u7684\u5e02\u573a\u975e\u5e38\u7ade\u4e89<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

According to the teacher, this sentence doesn’t work. Let’s see what the student should have done to avoid this problem. Please note that this is just an example; it could have been anything, really.<\/p>\n

* This example doesn’t work as well if you’re focusing on Taiwanese Mandarin; please refer to the note at the end for a discussion about this.<\/em><\/p>\n

Don’t assume so much; look it up!<\/h3>\n

The problem is that student assumed too much. While he would probably not translate on a word-by-word basis if given a whole sentence, this approach is still easy to fall back on if one word is missing from a sentence like the one above.<\/p>\n

He assumed that just because you can say that a situation is “very competitive” in English, you can express the same thing in Chinese, the only thing you need to look up how to say “competitive” and insert the first answer you find into the sentence.<\/p>\n

What he should have done instead, and what I want you to do, is to look it up in context. The best way of doing this is using a dictionary that offers a large number of example sentences which are not manually selected (such as YouDao.com<\/a>)\u00a0 or a dictionary that offers at least a few sentences that are manually selected (such as Pleco<\/a>, especially with extra dictionaries installed).<\/p>\n

Double translation<\/h3>\n

Once you have found the word you’re looking for, go to the entry for that word in Chinese and start checking example sentences. Your goal is to answer two questions:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Does this word mean what you want it to mean?<\/li>\n
  2. Is it used in the way you think it’s used?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Check a few examples. If the likely answer to both questions is “yes”, go ahead and write your sentence. If the answer to the first question is “no”, then go back to your English-Chinese translation and find another keyword (you probably got the wrong word that just happens to mean several things in English). If the answer to the second question is “no”, keep reading example sentences until you see a common pattern you can use.<\/p>\n

    So, let’s continue with the example above and answer the two questions:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Yes, \u7ade\u4e89 seems to be the right word. Most of the definitions that pop up in any dictionary will tell you that \u7ade\u4e89 is the right word to use.<\/li>\n
    2. No, it’s not used in the way shown above (\u5e02\u573a\u5f88\u7ade\u4e89). Looking at a few dozen example sentences, in most cases, \u7ade\u4e89 is actually a noun. One dictionary example actually shows “fierce competition” as “\u6fc0\u70c8\u7684\u7ade\u4e89”. Perhaps …\u7684\u7ade\u4e89\u5f88\u6fc0\u70c8 will work?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Using search engines to verify language usage<\/h3>\n

      When you have a sentence you think is correct, you can often check if it’s in common use or not by using a search engine (I’ve written a whole article about using search engines for learning Chinese<\/a>). This will not tell you if a wording is correct or not, but it can give you a very strong hint.<\/p>\n

      You can’t just paste your phrase and hit “go”, though, you need to remove or replace things that are unique to your sentence, but aren’t important. Remove unnecessary adjectives or other words that aren’t really part of the problem you’re trying to solve. You could also just input the words to see how they usually go together (if at all). Searching for \u5e02\u573a + \u7ade\u4e89 + \u6fc0\u70c8<\/a> gives a few examples:<\/p>\n