"这是你的汉语老师吗？"
Translation:Is this your Chinese teacher?
41 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
There are actually different ways to say "Chinese language".
汉语 (hàn yǔ) represents the language of the Han ethnic group (one of the 56 ethnic groups, which is representative of over 90% of the Chinese population), or Mandarin Chinese.
中文 (zhōng wén) encompasses all Chinese dialects (written and spoken）, but tends to refer to Mainland Chinese.
普通话 (pǔ tōng huà) literally translates to "common language" and is the official language of Mainland China.
国语 (guó yǔ) means "official language", (making it synonymous with 普通话), and used mostly in Taiwan (and sometimes Hong Kong).
华语 (huá yǔ) and 华文 (huá wén) are used in Southeast Asia (Singapore and Malaysia) to represent written and spoken "standard Mandarin"
If we look at the last example, we can take 语(written) and 文 (spoken) and add another dimension to learning!
The differences in the ways are subtle, but it enriches the language that much more :)
105
2020.5.28 The Cantonese sometimes refer to the Chinese language as 唐文 tang2wen2 ( apparently after the Tang Dynasty, another golden age for Chinese along with the Han Dynasty; I don't know if this refers specifically to Cantonese or Mando Chinese in general )
The sentence doesn't refer to a teacher from China, but a teacher that teaches the chinese language
中文 is not 中国人 The first refers to the Chinese language, the second to its people
Yeah that voice is so computerized hard to distinguish words and different tones.
I was actually just thinking that it's amazingly clear for a computerised voice! I think it's just a matter of getting used to a normal speed. Also, read about tone sandhi. It will help explain why some tones don't sound the way you expect.
Yes. 中文, broken down, means Middle + language in a more literary sense. Middle refers to the Chinese Kingdom, the middle kingdom. 汉语, broken down, means Han, the dominant group of Chinese people in China and the word more specific for language, as in what we speak, what we are learning to speak.
Chinese is directly refer to the langiage itself. So thats why you will not say english language teacher , jnstead you will say english teacher.
Because it should be Chinese language. Chinese has to be capitalized, since it's a language. I'm guessing English isn't your native language. It isn't my native language too, and I've lost count how many times I've been penalized by this specific grammar error...
Saying that is extra because all the languages have 语 after it so there is no need
So, it seems that Chinese shares with English the unusual grammatical acceptance of arbitrarily using a nouns as adjectives. In Romance languages I've studied, the word-for-word translation would have to come out as "Is this your teacher of Chinese?", since the word "汉语" here is a noun referring to the language of Chinese, not an adjective referring to a person's nationality. It seems that in Chinese, however, it is perfectly acceptable to say, "Is this your Chinese teacher?" in this context.
As I understand it, 汉语 means exactly "Chinese language", not "Chinese". So it is more like "Is this your Chinese language teacher question?". Quite different from English.
This sentence does NOT mean the teacher is Chinese. It means the teacher teachs Chinese. It's "Chinese teacher" like in "Math teacher".
This is not "unusual" in the world of languages. All Germanic languages, including English, have compound nouns that do not use prepositions in-between, and many languages outside Europe have a similar system, such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Romance languages are the unusual ones on this one.
Still German would strictly distinguish between a Chinese teacher (ein chinesischer Lehrer) and a teacher of Chinese (ein Chinesischlehrer)
Hanyu means language of the hans. It is a political term. Imagine language of the whites or language of the blacks...
in english a chinese teacher can be a teacher with chinese nationality or someone teaching chinese. Which of them is the good one in the translation?
这位是你的英语老师吗? (Zhè wèi shì nǐ de yīngyǔ lǎoshī ma?) is a more polite version of this sentence. The classifier for person 位 (wèi) denotes respect.
Anybody else here the audio speaking so fast and just stared at the screen like, O.O
What is the difference between 'zhong' and 'han' in terms of the word for China/Chinese?
Han was a Chinese dynasty, and as chinese is an old language it is hanyu. but now as it is china (zhongguo) and a new term has been introduced, "zhongwen"
- 330
Sorry I don't have a chineese keybiard, but could you put "ge ren" after "zhe" to clarify that you're talking about "this person." Or is it sufficient to just say "this" and imply that you're talking about a person?
Wouldn't it be much more proper to say：”这是你的中文老师吗？“ From my understanding， 中文 would be a more holistic teaching； while 汉语 would be more advanced class （like taking English in America）。But if I wanted to talk about learning Chinese as a second language，I'd say 中文老师？
Seems to me I remember this problem being harder in the past. There were more choices of English words. Has it been dumbed down for some reason?
Seems to me I remember this problem being harder in the past. There were more choices of English words. Has it been dumbed down for some reason?