欣赏 and 道具

[babygodzilla]

im so confused about 欣赏. i thought it means "appreciate," but when i said

我欣赏你的帮助 （i appreciate your help), or

欣赏母爱 (appreciate mother's love),

my teacher said these two examples are wrong. so what the hell does xinshang appreciate?? how confusing... i was given an example of 欣赏音乐, so that's appreciating a noun. but why cant i use is to appreciate help or love?

another question, what does 道具 mean?

thanks

[trien27]

xinshang = "to admire" not "to appreciate".

daoju = theatrical props

[trien27]

xinshang can mean "to enjoy", so xinshang yingyue = to enjoy music. I would not say "xinshang mu ai". That would cause confusion.

[Jonny Wang]

What I recall is that 欣赏can only be used for appreciation/enjoyment of aesthetic type things:　风景，　画，　音乐, 等

享受 is used for events, activities and also some things, I think: 时间/时刻， 晒太阳， etc.

But it seems that Chinese people are more likely to just use 喜欢 in both these cases.

As for how to say "I appreciate your help," the answer might be as simple as 谢谢，感谢 or 感恩. i.e., 感谢你的帮助 = thanks for your help = I　appreciate your help. ???

This might be one of those cases where spoke Chinese is just less complex/varied than spoken Chinese. appreciate1 = enjoy = like = 喜欢。 appreciate2 = thankful = thanks = 谢谢。

These are just my opinions as a fellow language learner though.

[imitation]

欣赏 really means to have an appreciation of something. I think you often learn it at the same time as 水平 (shui3 ping2) - which means level or degree you can do something. IE You will learn to say "He has a high level of appreciation of music". 他欣赏音乐的水平很高. I think this is right. Obviously if you learn the word in this context you would not say appreciation of help or mothers help.

If I have made some mistakes please correcft them.

[babygodzilla]

ahhhhhhhhhh ok... see if the dictionary had said "appreciation" on top of "to appreciate," that woulda made it much clearer...

thanks!

[imron]

This is why I prefer to use Chinese-Chinese dictionaries. It really helps reduce confusion in cases like this. For example, my Chinese dictionary defines 欣赏 as:

1）享受美好的事物，领略其中的趣味。2）认为好；喜欢。

Personally, I find reading this makes the actual meaning much clearer, compared to just the English meaning "to appreciate".

If you feel your Chinese isn't up to the level where you can use a Chinese-Chinese dictionary to learn new vocab, the other trick is to do reverse lookup, so if you look up the English meaning of a Chinese word, you should then lookup that English word and see what the Chinese meaning is. This way, if a word in English has several different meanings, it makes it easy to identify which of those meanings the Chinese word applies to.