"I'm not hungry; I'm thirsty."

Translation: 我不饿；我很渴。

[MaryAnnHeb]

The original statement does not state that he's "very thirsty" it only says he's thirsty.

[Sara770702]

很 does not mean very in most contexts, unless you stress it when you say it, normally it is just used because you need and adverb before the stative verb

[dTanMan]

May I ask where you're from, Sara? I'm curious as to how big of an effect does location have on nuances like these, as geography will most probably has an effect -- especially with a language as widely spoken as Chinese.

I, for example, wouldn't say "我很渴" to say I'm thirsty; I'd say "我渴了" (simply because saying only "我渴" does sound weird or awkward) or "我口渴了" (again, the 了 naturally comes forth for me to make it to sound more natural).

I've commented this somewhere else, but "很" naturally means "very" for me, and I'm genuinely bothered if my life has also been a lie all this time!

[Dennis385858]

I agree with you. I think there have been a lot of "nuances" artificially added to the language after the 1950s or maybe it's just the Beijing dialect of Mandarin (I'm no linguist, so this needs to be checked out). But 佷 is just one of these.

Those of us from the Chinese Diaspora seem to understand this and many other characters quite differently. One big one for me is the character 饭 which is used to mean 'meal' in the lessons here as in 早饭 for breakfast. We've always used 餐 which means meal, so breakfast should be 早餐 , same for lunch etc. Why twist the word for 'rice' to mean 'meal' when there is already a perfectly good and accurate word for that?

Should we start a thread to list the differences in nuances in words used in the Middle Kingdom as opposed to those used in the Diaspora? Just a thought.

[FrankChang15]

Agree with dTanMan. I would say 我口渴 for I'm thirsty instead of 我很渴.
I only got this right because whomever wrote the lessons likes to put random "很" into sentences where I've never seen them before.

[MomoSomero]

The 很 is there for grammatical reasons ;)

[IAmOnYourSide]

Then you would say 我渴了

[Patrick_Dark]

I would think "我不餓；很渴。" (with the second pronoun omitted) should also work, though I'm not certain because this sentence uses a semicolon instead of a comma.

[iKaribou]

Come ON, refused because I used a comma instead of a semicolon?! (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

[YozuTei]

I've never heard 很 in a situation where the person was just a bit thirsty, not even in china.

[iamnezha]

I'm not hungry; I'm thirsty --> 我不饿；我渴. Should at least be one of the correct answers, if not the only correct answer. It is the most accurate translation and grammatically correct.

[kalexchu]

It is currently accepted.

[MimiOng]

I used traditional character,"餓". It shouldn't have been excluded....

[purplelotus88]

Huh, I always said 《我饿了！我渴了！》but that was marked wrong.

[AlexTse3]

What's wrong with "hao ke"?

[HoGHe5wo]

hao ke (好渴) would mean pretty thirsty
however the only option I was given was
haohe (好喝), which means delicious (to drink)。
I think you might have mixed those up.

[derangedmtg]

what the ❤❤❤❤! "hen" means very and the english clearly states I'm not hungry I'm thirsty not I'm not hungry I'm VERY thirsty, so they should at least ACCEPT my answer of wo bu e, wo ke