Learn how to use Chinese adjectives
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| Hēi , dàjiā hǎo , wǒ jiào Mǎ Yànrú .Hi everybody! I’m YanruMa. |
| Welcome to ChineseClass101.com’s “Sān fēnzhōng Hànyǔ”. The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Chinese. |
| In the last lesson, we learned how to use a verb in the negative form. In this lesson, we will start to learn about Chinese adjectives and how to use them properly. |
| You will see that for adjectives, things in Chinese are just as easy as in English. |
| Let’s start with a concrete example: Zhè shì yī ge yǒuqù de yóuxì. |
| "It is a funny game." |
| [slowly] Zhè shì yī ge yǒuqù de yóuxì. |
| Have you noticed something? Yes,this sentence has the same structure in Chinese and English. Zhè means “it” here, shì is “is”, yī ge means “a”, yǒuqù de is an adjective which means “funny”, and yóuxì is “game”. |
| All together again, Zhè shì yī ge yǒuqù de yóuxì. |
| So now, let’s see another sentence to see if it really works or not. |
| How do we say "This is a red apple" in Chinese? |
| Let's see word by word. “This” is Zhè, “is” is shì, “an” is yī ge ”red” is hóngsè de, and “apple” is píngguǒ. |
| So the whole sentence would be Zhè shì yī ge hóngsè de píngguǒ. |
| [slowly] Zhè shì yī ge hóngsè de píngguǒ. |
| Here in the sentence above, can you tell which word is the adjective? Yes,that’s hóngsè de. I’m sure you must have noticed there is a word de at the end of each adjective in the two sentences above. What role do you think this little word plays here? Actually that’s one characteristic of Chinese adjective. When adjectives are used as attributives to modify nouns, de is usually necessary and added between adjectives and nouns to show the modifying relation. |
| Here, let’s see a few more useful adjectives for you to remember. These may help if you go traveling in China someday: |
| hǎochī de “delicious” |
| hǎo de “good” |
| guì de “expensive” |
| piányi de “cheap” |
| yuǎn de “far” |
| jìn de “near” |
| Now it’s time for Yanru’s Tips. |
| When the adjective is at the end of a sentence, for example, “this apple is delicious”, de is always omitted. So this sentence is Zhège píngguǒ hǎochī . |
| [slowly] Zhège píngguǒ hǎochī . |
| In this lesson, we learned how to properly use adjectives in Chinese. Next time we’ll learn the basic uses of verb qù, which is "To go," so that you will be able to say sentences like "I’m going to school." |
| Ok everyone, I’ll be waiting for you in the next Sān fēnzhōng Hànyǔ. |
| Zài jiàn ! |
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