use of 个 in a question

[cd6883]

@maybe: regarding your other question

Quote

ps. a sentence like "the student called David is my older brother" I translate in:

学生叫大卫是我哥哥

That should be:

叫大卫的学生是我哥哥[/Quote]

叫大卫的学生是我哥哥 is ambiguous, in Chinese，nouns can be singular or plural, i can understand it as everyone who called David is my brother，so 那个叫大卫的学生是我哥哥 is better.

[maybe]

叫大卫的学生是我哥哥 is ambiguous, in Chinese，nouns can be singular or plural, i can understand it as everyone who called David is my brother，so 那个叫大卫的学生是我哥哥 is better.

that's sounds good for me, but how sounds this? 那位叫大卫的学生是我哥哥 can I use 位 about my 大卫学生?

@xiaocai: I mean "how many chinese people are in milan?" in a very generic way, so I think 在米兰有多少中国人? is the best way, so I don't want use 几个 but use 多少

[daofeishi]

No, usage of 几 is not used to measure a small number of people.

Common usage disagrees with you, and even though I am not a prescriptivist, I have to point out that dictionaries, reference grammars and other teaching materials disagree with you too:

zdict: 询问数量多少（估计不太大）的疑问词

教老外汉语: 常代表1-9的数字

A Practical Chinese Grammar by Hung-nien Chang, Sze-yun Liu, Lilin Shi, p. 266: "...the target for 几 is smaller than ten"

mandarin review: 几 is used to expect a number which is under ten

I'm sorry, daofeishi, English and Mandarin are two completely different languages and you shouldn't compare them. When you can't think of an appropriate 量词 for a particular object, 个 is the best to use.

What I attempted to do was to illustrate a point through a simile, but I clearly didn't get my point across. Let me try to add to the example I gave above. As with that sentence, I think most people would consider

我买了两个书

我需要三个纸

这个衬衫大了点

草坪上有个马

to be wrong, especially in writing. Even though 个 is widely applicable, telling a learner that it is fine to use it as a universal measure word is bad advice.

but both are correct according to the dictionary.

A dictionary is not a tool you can use to prescribe word usage that is not commonly accepted. The dictionary's use of 某物 is not an invitation to use 个 with any kind of object.

I can't just say it's wrong because people don't use it.

Here is something to think about: What do you think it means for a linguistic construct to be wrong? What is it exactly that determines whether a word or phrase is used wrongly?

[jbradfor]

I'm sorry, daofeishi, English and Mandarin are two completely different languages and you shouldn't compare them. When you can't think of an appropriate 量词 for a particular object, 个 is the best to use.

Just like in English, if you can't think of how to correctly conjugate "to be", leaving it as "to be" is best. But it's still wrong, and people will not be impressed by your knowledge of English if you keep saying "I to be happy".

Unlike English, in Mandarin you would have to write a lot of 量词.

Something tells me daofeishi knows what a measure word is and how often they need to be used.....

[Danny2312]

.....

[Danny2312]

.....

[creamyhorror]

I think the point here is really simple and there isn't a really big point of contention. If you know the 量词 for something, use it; otherwise, use

个 and see if you get any corrections. Try to learn specific 量词s wherever possible.

If no one writes something a certain way, it's likely to be either (1) wrong or (2) "unnatural". There can be rules that are unstated but followed by most educated users of a language.

BTW, "I know a lot of vocabularies" is probably wrong, since "vocabulary" refers to a set of words in a context. "I have a large vocabulary" or "I know a lot of inappropriate vocabulary" would be fine.

[Danny2312]

.....

[jbradfor]

"vocabularies" is a word. It is the plural of "vocabulary" in the technical sense of a list of words / tokens / codes that can be used in a specific situation. However, in this case I think your example is flawed: outside that technical meaning, I would hazard a guess that all uses of "I know a lot of vocabularies" by non-native speakers is incorrect, because they are using "vocabulary" in the common meaning of "the words one knows in a given language". And for this meaning, "vocabularies" is not the correct plural for "vocabulary". Your example is flawed because you picked a word that has two meanings, and just because "I know a lot of vocabularies" is correct for one meaning of "vocabulary", doesn't mean that the sentence "I know a lot of vocabularies" is correct when used for the other meaning.

I'm sorry that I'm gonna say this again: Don't ever compare English and Mandarin.

No need to apologize. But just know that we're not going to obey you, and we're going to continue to compare English and Mandarin.

[Danny2312]

.....

[maybe]

wowow I lost the key of thread! xD

who can help me to solve this

that's sounds good for me, but how sounds this? 那位叫大卫的学生是我哥哥 can I use 位 about my 大卫学生?

and

Tomorrow I will go to house's friend. In his home (will be better there, but there+there sounds bad) there are a lots of chinese books

我明天去朋友的家。 他家有很多汉语书

I use 的 to tell "the house of friend" right? sorry but 的 in italian period is hard to translate without change meaning to sentence

[daofeishi]

Danny, I think you misunderstood the point I was trying to make, but I think we have flogged this dead horse long enough. Just a few closing remarks from me:

几个人 is accepted informally. Formally I would too suggest you to avoid because obviously 多少 is much better, informally I would say it's okay. Actually, 几个人 is used informally for too many times and I wouldn't say it is completely wrong. So I stood by what I said earlier: it's not wrong.

To get back to what I was trying to say earlier: The grammar that you find in textbooks and the definitions you find in dictionaries are entirely descriptive of how native speakers use their language. They are not a "rule book" to how a language is used. To simplify it a bit, without going into the science of preferential relations: If a certain collocation is not used, or used with sufficiently low frequency by speakers in a given region, then that collocation is deemed to be wrong. Never mind the "general rules" that linguists have tried to extract and put into the textbooks. If the rules overgeneralize and/or do not reflect the way the language is used in real life, then the textbook is "wrong", not the speakers. From my experience, in mainland China a sentence like "宁夏有几个农民？" would be considered wrong by this definition of wrong, for the reasons that I mentioned and provided citations for above.

量词 does not have a rule to follow, but the verb 'to be' does, so please don't compare them, it simply doesn't work.

Of course there are rules that measure words have to obey. The study of those rules is called "syntax", and what we were discussing was the subfield of syntactical collocation. That measure words have no morphological changes is irrelevant to the point that I was making: That there are constructions where the use of 个 is considered wrong, and as such it should not be advocated as a "universal" measure word. Now, going back and reading your post again, I am not sure if that is what you were trying to say, and I think we are in agreement when you say that if you do use 个 whenever you do not know the appropriate measure word "there is a chance you'll get it wrong too, but 个 is still the best." I will agree that 个 is your best bet, but that does not make 一个狗 and 两个车 acceptable constructions, which is what I thought you were saying at first.

Feel free to compare Mandarin and English. I'm learning three languages in schools now, all with different grammar structures, and if I do realise comparing languages helps, I would have encouraged you to do so.

Good, keep on learning languages. We are many people on here who do so. Many of us speak more than one language fluently, and some of us might have studied some comparative linguistics to boot. I have personally found out, growing up speaking another language than English and sometimes having had to informally instruct non-native speakers in that language, that we should be wary of claiming expertise in a language based solely on the fact that we are native speakers. There are dialectical and ideolectical differences we might not be aware of, especially when we live far away from the region where the language is primarily spoken. Therefore some humility is a good thing.

[Danny2312]

.....

[xiaocai]

因为比较语言是绝对行不通的

这可不一定。要不然也不会有比较语言学。

And 一个狗 just sounds very awkward to me. I will never say that. And I'd probably laugh if a Chinese person ever says 一个狗.

Back to questions in post #31:

那位叫大卫的学生是我哥哥

You can use 位 here. I can't say it is wrong. But 个 sounds more natural to me.

我明天去朋友的家。 他家有很多汉语书。

I don't see any problem here. You may also say 朋友家 for short. It is more common in spoken Mandarin.

[Danny2312]

.....

[creamyhorror]

Feel free to compare Mandarin and English. I'm learning three languages in schools now, all with different grammar structures, and if I do realise comparing languages helps, I would have encouraged you to do so. Comparing different languages is why most English learners face difficulties in mastering English because they tend to compare their mother tongue with English, and sometimes this leads to the formation of new languages like Chinglish, Manglish, Singlish e.t.c

You know, I understand what the problem is. It lies in your use of the word "compare". To compare two languages does not mean to blindly assume things are similar between them. When I was in school we were always told not to think Chinese was similar to English. But that is not comparison at all; that is assuming they are the same.

To "compare languages" in English means to observe how they are similar and different in various aspects. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, and that's why the field of comparative linguistics exists (as xiaocai said). If anything, it's a step beyond the language learning we do in primary and secondary school. We never engaged in formal comparative language study, because it was simply too advanced for teens who were still mastering their own languages.

"Comparing" languages does not mean mixing them up. That is something called "interference", where the user's knowledge of one language interferes with his/her grasp of the other (possibly because he/she assumes one is like the other).

[Danny2312]

.....