Lesson 012. Home sweet home.
In this lesson you will learn about your home and about things you can find in your home. You’ll be able to say all that in Chinese. This lesson presents many new words, the main focus of this lesson is on sentence patterns: ” in…., at…. on…, under…..
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March 27th, 2006 at 12:06 am
Hi Serge. I find your podcasts helpful. See here, I’m a foreign student studying in Taiwan, so I’m learning Mandarin. Thanks for the lessons.
June 25th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
Another question. In Lesson 12, why is it 房子不是很大 instead of just 房子不很大?
–Joe
June 25th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
Nihao Joseph!
很高兴你喜欢我的播客！（Hen3 gao1xing4 ni3 xi3huan1 wo3de bo1ke4!）
OK, good question. In short, in this kind of context, there are only TWO possible ways of saying: 房子不是很大(fang2zi bu2shi4 hen3 da4) or 房子不大(fang2zi bu2 da4), so not 房子不很大(fang2zi bu4 hen3 da4)。
My explanation would be that Chinese language “likes” even number of syllables, let’s say 6,4,2 etc, in order to rhyme properly. In this case, we have fang zi bu shi hen da=6, fang zi bu da=4, but fang zi bu hen da=5. That’s my explanation. If you ask a Chinese person why it’s like that, they would probably just say: “because it sounds weird without a verb”
Hope this helps
Serge
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Learn Mandarin Chinese with Serge Melnyk
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November 11th, 2007 at 7:12 pm
你好,
The line A hanzi has a mistake in it. It says:
这是你住的地方吗?
It should say:
这是你住的住宅吗?
November 11th, 2007 at 11:19 pm
你好 Arvind,
Yes, thanks for pointing this out. I have already corrected the transcript.
谢谢!
Serge