"他姓王。"
Translation:His last name is Wang.
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Tā is written different based on the radicals, but pronounced the same way, 他 breaks down into 2 parts, 人 which is "man" (the left part of the character) and 也 which means "also" or "other" - so literally speaking this character means "other male person". Female on the other hand is still Tā but is written as 她 where the first radical comes from 女 meaning "female".
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Yes. I almost put that, but then it occurred to me that it is very useful to remember this phrase specifically if you are telling someone about the fact that the last name is always placed in the first position in Chinese. I answered "last name" also to help me learn all the characters since I find learning this language to be quite a different challenge.
That is why I learned to refer to family name and given name. Using these there is no room for misunderstanding. I was also taught that 姓 roughly translates to honorable name.
This feels like it was chosen to trip up students with a background in Chinese... Putting a sentence like that in a lesson about occupations would definitely get someone to mistranslate it as ‘he is a king’, haha.
So the middle character is xing and when pronounced on its own sounds like "shin"
but in the sentence the middle character sounds much different. What's going on there?
Yes. It sounds like "s'i/shi" in this audio. And the first character sounds like "pa/pha" here, but not like "ta"
lol...I accidentally translated it into German instead of English. I'm native German, living in Texas. And so it begins. The mixing of all my languages...
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Xing as last name works in petty much every cases, while 姓氏 Xing Shi on the other hand is bookish, you usually don't use it.
Tip for all: it is helpful to try and identify radicals in characters, it can give a clue of what a character means and maybe even its tone. I find doing this very helpful. e.g. 吃 ( to eat ) has the radical 口 kǒu in it. Kǒu means mouth and the fact that the radical kou is in chi, means that it has to do with a mouth. Another example is 水 (shuǐ）游泳 (youyong) to swim. The radical 水 is included in 游泳, which gives us a clue that the character is related to water, which helps us narrow it down to a particular semantic field. I hope this helped. P.S You may also want to either memorise radicals or check out ChineseFor.Us on youtube, they have a very good immersive teaching process there and i also learnt this tip from them. Thank you !
In this example ta1 sounds like it's being pronounced "ha". Is that a defect in the audio? Is there a work-around to report audio problems when not given the option at the bottom of the page for that example?
The fact that saying "his surname is Wong" is wrong is ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤. But you say "his last name is Wong" and its correct. Lameeeee
This question appears to be broken; the correct answer is apparently wrong. https://i.imgur.com/P2EH7JU.jpg
I didn't know what's the difference between "last name" and "surname" they mean the same...
English translation here isn't great. It is in reference to his surname which in Chinese would actually come first. Saying last name in English isn't very good.
Argh. Why WHY does it sound like pa??? Am I just hearing things or is it intentionally supposed to not match the pinyin?
When sounded out on its own it is clearly ta but when in this sentence... pa?
Could someone be a kind soul and put me out my misery?
If i want to say "is wang his last name" all I have to do is add ma. Right??
I asked my Chinese friend this a while back. The confusion is that 'xing' is a verb which means 'having the surname'
He has the surname Wang makes sense.
His has the surname Wang doesn't make sense.
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That is correct, my friend. Though it would be otherwise, in the context of naming a surname, 姓 is a verb, not a noun.
How will I know the difference between 'he' and 'she'? They both have the exact same symbol!
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Sadly you don't, but it'll make it easier when you talk by comparison with English. And that's how it confused Chinese people the other way around. It'll get better when you used to it；）
I wrote Her last name is Wang but it wasn't accepted and the correct answer is His last name is Wang.
