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- "你叫李华。"
"你叫李华。"
Translation:You are Li Hua.
273 Comments
24
How are chinese names said? Is it Li Hua or Hua Li? (So happy to see chinese on Duolingo!)
Why the downvotes? "Your bent" = your inclination, and "you're bent" = you're corrupt. Relating that to my practice here - if I'm right, it should be ni3 de = your and ni3 shi4 = you're, which are of course different sounds and characters. A mistake in one language will lead to a mistake in the other. My point is that the earlier post is correct, "you're" and "your" are still not interchangeable, and the downvotes are unwarranted.
I am not sure if this is a common sense for foreign people, but just a reminder for those who don't know: In Chinese, the first name is followed by the surname. Traditional Chinese first name is mostly one character, some are two. And the first name can be one character or two, both are usual (the two-character-surname is more common). Since individual characters can have their own meaning, Chinese people usually use some characters representing positive meaning to name their children.
"First" and "last" names are really confusing.
It's FAMILY name, then GIVEN name, in China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Hungary, and small pockets in other countries.
Fun fact: the concept of a last/family name of lineage did not exist in most of Europe until some time around the Renaissance, which was directly caused by Chinese trade of ideas (and pasta) to Italy.
477
Yes. Surname + Firstname.
Twists Li Hua into a girl's name and add Mei between it, you get Li Meihua 李美華. 美華 can be understand as good / beautiful ages. Also 華 to some extent can be referred to 花, a beautiful flower then.
1213
Thanks... Here is where (in my opinion) the course breaks, and I cannot use it. The throw names out like we are supposed to know the difference between first names and last names. Many of us don't. In the course they should note what type of names they are.
128
When I put mouse to see name it is said just Li can you improve that please to be written Hua Li :)
12
The recording isn't always accurate especially for characters which have more than one pronunciation or characters that have different pronunciations depending on the characters before and/or after them, so I usually turn it off.
Here 李华 is pronounced Li3 Hua2. There are no changes at all.
It's called grammar. If you take a dictionary, and try to translate all the world in the order you find them, you will get only nonsense, in any languages. Many Asian languages omit the "to be" verb, where European languages use it. It's different grammar construction.
The dictionary translation for this word is "you" and "your", they're right, the rest is grammar construction.
966
叫 can be also treated as a verb "to be named", just like in French, Polish, Russian, German, Spanish…
The literal translation would be "You are called Li Hua" but that would sound awkward to most native English speakers, which is why, for education purposes, it should be translated as "You're name is Hua Li". To add some perspective, let's take the question "¿Cuántos años tienes?" In Spanish. The literal translation would be "How many years do you have?" Which wouldn't make sense at all if English is your mother language. In that case, I'm sure Duolingo would opt for the way more comfortable "How old are you?". Each language has its own set of rules, even if the linguists find common ground to study and to teach them.
You're right. Languages have different grammar and word order. I don't understand why people wan to have the same way to say something, the same word order, in every languages.
In French it's literally "I call myself + name". That's absurd in English, you have to put it in the right English order, and put "My name is". But you won't have I = my, call = name, and myself = is. The word are simply not in the same order, because the grammar is different.
Same thing here. (1)You - (2)are called - (3)name.
There is no more reason to include the "are" in the (1) than in the (2)
If someone speaks French, the Chinese construction here is closer from French than from English
(1)Tu - (2) t'appelles - (3) name
The "are" is nowhere in the French sentence... Remember that the English "are" is, most of the time, NOT translated in the other languages. It's only a form of immediate present, it has 0 meaning by itself!
English would say more naturally: my name is...
Problem is that they say you are, when it should be your name is... Also they make beginners confused with the Li hua being family name first or given name first. Family name comes last, but here they say the family name first when they speak, which is correct but allow both when writing. It's confusing for most and unconventional.
433
I have a hard time reading chinese characters! I mean how do we supposed to learn the pronounciation of chinese characters?! I'm totaly clueless
It would be helpful if the pinyin is written below every character in sentence and/or in sliding tip when clicking words, since writing/char learning by memory is nearly impossible to learn for Non-Chinese, without pinyin to sustain familiarity with 5 tones (āáǎàa) and r, zh, x, sh, ch, q sounds, would be almost guessing
你叫李华-ni jiao li hua means your name is Li Hua but if i say 我叫李华-wo jiao li hua that means my name is Li Hua.姓-Xing means last name so if xing is infront of a name than that automatically means that name is a last name the duolingo example names so far are li,li hua,zhang,zhang ming,ming,wang. I hope that helped you!
What are you trying to say? It seems to have something to do with the microphone, so try reading here: https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=microphone&commit=Search
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In voice over of the Chinese sentence, I hear "dee" sound for 'Li'. Is it a mistake or it has some explanation!
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English character transliteration could be useful. I don't know if it is the best method though to learn how to read Chinese. Characters
1320
If you're referring to the use of Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, then yes, that would be useful for learners to learn how to pronounce/read Chinese characters.