Learn how to use the verb "to come"
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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 the verb xǐhuān. |
| In this lesson, we will learn how to use lái, the fourth verb in our series dedicated to the most common Chinese verbs. |
| Lái means "to come" in Chinese, and we use it a lot! So let’s go! |
| Imagine a friend of yours is organizing a party and he asks you Nǐ lái cānjiā wǒmen de jùhuì ma? That means "Are you coming to our party?" |
| So let’s break down this question: |
| First we had |
| nǐ which is simply "you." |
| Then lái, which is "to come" in Chinese. |
| Finally we had ma which is a phrase-final particle used in questions as we have learned in the previous lesson. So, all together it is Nǐ lái cānjiā wǒmen de jùhuì ma? |
| [slowly] Nǐ lái cānjiā wǒmen de jùhuì ma? |
| So supposing you want to go, you will say, èn, wǒ qù. That means "Yes I’m coming!" |
| [slowly] Èn ,wǒ qù. |
| Notice that here you need to say qù instead of lái in the question. Do you remember what qù means? Yes,it means" to g o". So just like English, they are antonyms. To the speaker, lái means from the far to the near, and qù is just the opposite. |
| Let’s repeat the question and the answer again. |
| Nǐ lái cānjiā wǒmen de jùhuì ma?... |
| èn ,wǒ qù. |
| To add to this question, you can also put something before this verb, for example Wǒ hé péngyou yīqǐ qù. Here you said "Yes, I am coming with some friends." |
| Let’s see how to say "come back" or "to come again" in Chinese. We can see it word by word. “Come” is lái, “back” in Chinese is huí. But come back in Chinese is not lái huí. It is huílai . And “to come again” is zàilái |
| Now it’s time for Yanru’s tips. |
| Imagine somebody has knocked at your door, and you want him or her to come in. You can say jìn lai. But this is a very informal way and you should be careful with your tone, because sometimes it can sound like an order. If you want to invite someone in, you can say qǐng jìn. Literally, this means “please come in”, but here we don’t need to say lái at the end. |
| In this lesson, we learned how to use the verb lái to ask people to join you! |
| With that, our lesson series about common Chinese verbs is over, and from the next lesson, we will jump into some very important interrogative Chinese words! |
| Do you know how to ask questions starting with "What" in Chinese? I’ll be waiting for you with the answer in the next “Sān fēnzhōng Hànyǔ” lesson. |
| zàijiàn ! |
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