Mandarin disyllabism for beginners

April 11, 2025 @ 4:32 pm · Filed by under Rhythm, Syllabism, Variation

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tā jiǎng dé hěn qīngchǔ
她講得很清楚

tā jiǎng dé fēicháng qīngchǔ
她講得非常清楚

tā jiǎng dé tèbié qīngchǔ
她講得特別清楚

tā jiǎng dé shífēn qīngchǔ
她講得十分清楚

tā jiǎng dé qīngqīngchǔchǔ
她講得清清楚楚

tā jiǎng dé qīngchǔ de bùdéliǎo
她講得清楚得不得了

tā jiǎng dé bùnéng zài qīngchǔle
她講得不能再清楚了
("She couldn't have explained it more clearly"

All seven sentences say the same thing, "She explained it clearly", with various nuances. This is a language learning game I like to play to show how much flexibility there can be in Mandarin expressions.

 

Selected readings

[Thanks to John Rohsenow]

April 11, 2025 @ 4:32 pm · Filed by under Rhythm, Syllabism, Variation


4 Comments »

  1. Julian said,

    April 11, 2025 @ 5:54 pm

    This one –
    tā jiǎng dé qīngqīngchǔchǔ
    – reminded me of LL post "French girl sells crepes in a Taiwan market" for a reason which I could not not put the finger on at first, but on reviewing that post I realised it was because of the repetition at about 1:25 "ren ren de…. qu qu de….."
    I assume there's something similar going on linguistically? It's a neat feature.

  2. Jonathan Smith said,

    April 11, 2025 @ 6:42 pm

    This has been posted before
    https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=57905

  3. Peter Cyrus said,

    April 12, 2025 @ 3:41 am

    One might think that the two-syllable words would be preferred in speaking because they are less ambiguous, whereas the characters mean that even 1-syllable words are unambiguous in writing.

  4. JMGN said,

    April 12, 2025 @ 7:43 am

    I'll be concise for those knowledgeable, and refer to brief and basic bibliography for those who are not.

    The Chinese elasticity/flexibility is a lexical property of chinese terms, two sides of the same coin, which must be reflected in the very same entry for a certain lemma.

    Therefore, for example the fifth version of the prestigious XDHYCD (Xiandai Hanyu Cidian) applies mutual annotations in the respective entries, so that the entry for 煤 mei ‘coal’ reads "noun, … also called 煤炭 mei-tan ‘coal-charcoal’", and the entry for 煤炭 meitan ‘coal-charcoal’ is annotated as "noun, 煤 mei ‘coal’".

    Unfortunately, currently in wiktionary this is wrongly reflected in the broadly termed 'compounds' section, as a synonym or after 'see also', and only for the monosyllabic version.

    Please, before commenting read the following brief article (and if necessary further references within it); if you still have any questions, I'll be glad to try and answer them.

    http://www-personal.umich.edu/~duanmu/2014Elastic.pdf

    Finally, elasticity from Xiandai Hanyu Cidian 2005 has been tabulated in the following open access thesis
    http://web.archive.org/web/20190322024027/https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/116629/yandong_1.pdf?sequence=1

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