好像 hao3 xiang4 or 好象 ?

[lokki]

I have seen both 好像 hao3 xiang4 and 好象 hao3 xiang4 used. They are different characters but the same pronunciation and apparently the same meaning (as if, seem, be like) according to the dictionaries.

Is there any difference at all between them? Which one is to be preferred? Any examples where only one of them is correct, or where using one or the other changes the meaning?

[yonglin]

As far as I've understood, this is just a matter of taste (similar to 惟一、唯一): it's usually 好像 in textbooks, but I saw 好象 in a novel by 老舍.

A google search yields about 58 million hits for 好像 and 4 million hits for 好象, so it seems like the former is a lot more popular, but this could of course be because of the dominance of a few pinyin-input systems which may have this as the default for "haoxiang".

Waiting for input from the more knowledgable...

[muyongshi]

Only 好像 is correct...

It just one of those things were this is the "correct" way. Technically 象 is elephant but due to whatever both are used but any "teacher of standard mandarin" (meaning those with a degree in it and that is their profession) will say 好像.

In the oxford dictionary only one is listed. What dictionary were you looking at?

[jiehunzheng]

好像 is correct.

好象 is a typo. 象 means no "as if", "resemble" or alike.

象 means "phenomenon", "symbol", "view", "omen".

FYI.

[zozzen]

i dont know if 老舍 has used 好象 in his novel. if so, then he just made a mistake. in fact, typo is not rare throughout many classic works, it seemed that even emperors, particularly in qing dynasty, werent immune from this problem. i am reading a book about qixi emperess published by CCTV that gave a lot of these examples.(just no one dared to correct it a hundred years ago)

[zhwj]

This is one of the things that got messed up during the back-and-forth over simplification. It was rendered 好象 at one point in some charts and dictionaries, but then reversed.

this is funny:

女：哥哥，我好象爱上你了。

　　男：不是好象吧。

　　女：讨厌，人家是女孩子，脸皮薄的嘛。

　　男：我说的是，不是好象。

　　女：嗯嗯嗯，人家不干了，你非逼人家说真话。

　　男：其实是好像。

　　女：不是的不是的，我真的爱上你了！

　　男：你看，字典上都说了，是好像，不是好象

　　女（晕倒了）：……

[muyongshi]

Copy that and put it into the joke section. That is good! :lol:

[yonglin]

It was rendered 好象 at one point in some charts and dictionaries, but then reversed.

I think this hypothesis is absolutely fascinating. I haven't found any evidence for this though. My little research found that during the second round of simplifcation (later revoked), 像 was simplified to 亻向.

On this page, most people seemed to think that 好像 was correct, but there were some people who proposed the hypothesis that there was a slight different in nuance.

[zhwj]

I've got a 1989 edition of The Chinese English Dictionary 汉英词典 whose simplification scheme in the back lists 象 as the simplified form of 像, with a footnote that 像 may be used if the sense could be confused, the same rule that governs 余 and 馀.

Later editions of the dictionary, in the 1990s, note that 象 is no longer to be considered as the simplified form of 像 at all.

The 1986 reissue of the 1964 standard for simplified characters, in addition to rolling back the 1965 draft, made some changes to the original as well. This included turning 象 and 像 back into separate characters, and doing the same thing for 迭/叠, 复/覆, and 囉[啰]/罗. Dictionaries followed suit along their normal publication schedules, apparently.

Here's an in-depth discussion.

[adrianlondon]

The books I used to self-study (Pactical Chinese Reader, published in the 70s) use 象 but when I got to BNU last year I got corrected to 像. I mentioned why I'd written it "wrong" and was told that the xiang character was changed some time in the 80s.

[muyongshi]

From the link yonglin provided...

你来问，我来答，这个问题难不住我

好象：一只很好的大象

好像：你很像那只很好的大象。

I think it answers the question beautifully!

[YuehanHao]

I have known for some time that 好像 is preferred to 好象 for the usage in question; however, my C-E dictionary includes only 好象 in the Chinese section. Perhaps I should invest in a new dictionary...

约翰好！

[Etwood]

I find this topic quite interesting...In my University textbook, they have the dialogues both in Traditional and Simplified, and when this word appears, it appears as 好象 in both the Traditional and Simplified texts. This textbook was published in 2000 in the USA.

I also looked in my Oxford Concise English-Chinese Chinese-English dictionary (2nd ed.) but they have it as 好像. Quite strange. I'll ask my Chinese teacher tomorrow, because when we went over the text with 好象 in it, we weren't told to change the character or anything.

[magudo]

“好象”只有一种情况会出现

写错字或者打错字的时候