Vocabulary

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Lesson Transcript

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 Chinese adjectives easily.
In this lesson we will start a series of lessons dedicated to the most common Chinese verbs, the ones you will certainly hear all the time!
The first verb in our series will be qù, which means "to go". Of course we will use this word along with many different destinations.
So imagine someone asks you Nǐ qù nǎ dù jià? That means "Where are you going for your holidays?"
So if you are going to a ski resort, for example, you will say in Chinese Wǒ qù huáxuě dùjiàcūn
[slowly] Wǒ qù huáxuě dùjiàcūn.
So let’s break down this answer:
First we had-
Wǒ qù which is "I am going to..."
As we know, Chinese words don’t change according to person, so no matter whether the subject is “I”, “she” or “he”, the verb stays the same. After it was huáxuě dùjiàcūn which is your destination, in this case “ski resort”.
Wǒ qù huáxuě dùjiàcūn .
[slowly] Wǒ qù huáxuě dùjiàcūn .
So now, you might be wondering how to tell what tense a sentence is. Ok, as we said, we don’t change the form of the verb to show which tense we are talking about, but instead we use some words that indicate different tenses, such as jiāng yào which means “will”, or “be going to”, and le indicates perfect tense or past tense.
But sometimes present tense can refer to something you are going to do. Take the sentence above as an example - Wǒ qù huáxuě dùjiàcūn. You could add jiāng yào to make it clear that it’s a sentence in the future tense, but jiāng yào is mostly used in writing and not so much in spoken language. We usually judge what tense a sentence is from the context it is in.
Now it’s time for Yanru’s tips.
Imagine someone asks you and your friend "Where are you going now?" And you want to invite her/him to go with you. You can say wǒmen qù túshūguǎn, nǐ hé wǒmen yīqǐ qù ma? which means "We are going to the library,would you like to go with us? In this case wǒmen is equal to "We", and yīqǐ means “together.”
But you can also say Nǐ qù ma? for short, which literally means “Would you like to go, too?”
So, in this lesson, we learned how to use the verb qù. Next time, we’ll learn another very useful verb, zuò.
Do you know what this Chinese verb means? I’ll be waiting for you in the next Sān fēnzhōng Hànyǔ.
Zài jiàn !

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