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…..
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.
Another question. In Lesson 12, why is it 房子不是很大 instead of just 房子不很大?
–Joe
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
—————————————————————
Learn Mandarin Chinese with Serge Melnyk
http://www.melnyks.com
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?
你好 Arvind,
Yes, thanks for pointing this out. I have already corrected the transcript.
谢谢!
Serge
about the question, 房子不是很大:
I would actually disagree with Serge on this one and say that the Chinese when speaking Chinese don’t care how many characters a sentance has. That only matters with Idioms and Proverbs (成语 cheng2yu)
Whenever you want to use the characters 不 and 很, you must put 是 between them. Its just a grammar rule with no reason behind it besides thats the way it was made, just like many other grammar rules. When you don’t want to use the negation 不, you don’t need to use 是… It can be used, but definitely not necessary, unless trying to make yourself extra clear.
You are right, Lee, indeed, this is just the way it IS and everyone just must memorize it (like many other grammar rules). You know, my approach to learning Mandarin has always been ‘just take it as it is, do not try to understand everything, or compare to other languages, but better learn through examples and try to get the FEELING of it, the yu3gan3(语感)-yu3yan2(语言)－language, gan3jue2(感觉)－feeling.
And this yu3gan3 comes with continuos practice: listening and speaking.
Once you get it, you will feel what’s right and what’s wrong.