Goodbye

[fr1ends4ever]

hi guys,

I'm just taking my first steps to learn some mandarin online. I'm happy to discover this place Great to see so many mandarin students. My question is simple:

再见 zai4 (again) jian4 (see) means goodbye.

But what does zai jian liao mean ? and how do I write the last word liao ?

[gougou]

I don't think that's meant to be that way. I could think of either 再聊, "let's chat again sometime", or something like 再见咯, where the last character doesn't carry any meaning and is just there to make the sentence sound a bit more casual.

[wai ming]

Maybe it's liao as in 了. It's not standard Putonghua, but common amongst Mandarin-speaking Malaysians and Singaporeans.

[coco]

再见means goodbye/see u later,and 再见了（zai jian le,not liao)means we won't see again or we won't see each other very soon.

[doraemon]

I think you mean 再见了 as in zai jian le (which is how the word is read in this case), not zai jian liao. It basically means the same thing as 再见, but it sounds a bit less formal. ;)

[fr1ends4ever]

ok now I'm confused

The words were written in pinyin by a native (not singaporean or malaysian) speaker at end of a chat session.

I was also asked to write mail, which I thought was a bit odd, so maybe coco has a point there.

So any of the explanations could be true. At least on my keyboard 了is shown both if I write le and liao.

[Erbse]

再见聊

When we meet again, we will talk.

[renzhe]

So any of the explanations could be true. At least on my keyboard 了is shown both if I write le and liao.

了 is only pronounced liao if used as a complement, not as an aspect particle.

EDIT: clarification, 了 is both a verb (liao) and a particle (le).

As a verb, it only appears alone when it is used as a complement (e.g. ...不了 ), though it can appear as a part of compound words in other contexts (like 了解).

As a particle, it's le, not liao.

[luozhen]

Erbse is right. It's a Chinese typo.

[fr1ends4ever]

gougou wrote:

I don't think that's meant to be that way

luozhen wrote:

Erbse is right. It's a Chinese typo.

I find Erbses explaination appealing.

But why is it a typo ? What should it have been ?

[SiMaKe]

But why is it a typo ? What should it have been ?

In using an (pinyin based) IME, you type in pinyin then choose the correct character from the list. Sometimes many of us just inadvertently pick the wrong character as we are thinking more about what we are trying to say and don't catch the error. E.g., if you type in ”liao“, you should see 聊 and 了 among others. The writer just selected the wrong one.

Apparently it should have been 聊。

[luozhen]

I've seen "改天聊", but not 再见聊. Another possibility is that they wanted to say "啦". With the input though, who knows what's their most frequent characters, because those will jump higher in the list. They only need to type "L" in order to pull up a list of characters starting with "L".

[renzhe]

The OP said that the sentence was written in pinyin, so:

zai jian liao

I don't think that a native speaker would accidentally type "liao" if they meant "le". They didn't write 了, they wrote "liao".

[fr1ends4ever]

yes, that is correct. The words were written in the latin alphapet

Thanks for the explainations Renzhe, it has made me conclude that it couldn't have been 再见了that was written. I could not fully understand everything since I haven't read any grammar yet, but I hope I can grasp it soon

[SiMaKe]

renzhe,

Thank you for setting this (and me) straight. Once characters were introduced the discussion got a little murky.

So it seems the conclusion is that the original message "zai jian liao" most likely meant "when we meet again, we will talk" (as stated by Erbse). Sort of typical efficient/telegraphic Chinese. And, if that is the case, then there was no typo involved.

Another possible (but unlikely I think) conclusion is that the person who sent the message was using a word processing application with an autofill feature, and they meant to type "la" or "le".