Extra 看？

[patrickpatrick2]

I came across this clause that says, ＂我们看了看菜单＂。Is the second 看 necessary? Why can't it just say ＂我们看了菜单"?

[anonymoose]

Both are OK, but they mean different things.

我们看了看菜单 means "I had a quick look at the menu"

我们看了菜单 means "I looked at the menu", and would probably be followed by some further speech.

[Chris-T]

yes,it is. "vt.+了+vt." the action has lasted for a while. vt+了 the action just has done.

[jbradfor]

Really? I thought that reduplicating a verb (e.g. 看 -> 看看/看一看) indication that it happened informally or briefly.

[yialanliu]

Duplication of words primarily is used for softening verbs.

For instance

让我看 = very harsh, typically used in anger

让我看一看 = softer, used normally

让我看看 = same as the softer

I disagree with anonymoose, I think both should have follow up.

看过了 can be used alone much better than both examples given.

I also disagree with Chris,

I don't think it has that meaning at all.

[Chris-T]

I disagree with Yialanliu,cause the quetion is the differences between 看了看 and 看了

We can say 看了，but we never say 看一，so your e.g. was not right.

[David Wong]

I get the impression that 看了看 implies that they didn't find anything to their liking at first glance, so had to look again. Roughly translated to: "We had a really good look at the menu".

[yialanliu]

I disagree with Yialanliu,cause the quetion is the differences between 看了看 and 看了

We can say 看了，but we never say 看一，so your e.g. was not right.

That makes no sense.

看了

看看

看一看

These are WORDS. You can't just break them up and expect a word to come out all the time. That's like saying in english "firetruck" and then you break the word to fire which is okay, but if you tries "retru" it doesn't work.

With that said, I was referring to WHY we use these words with duplicated charaters. Not a direct reason to answering the question but giving background because the answer was pretty much given by anonymoose and I just wanted to clarify the grammar rule of why chinese has these duplication of characters within words.

In my opinion, they(看了，看了看） mean similar things but a duplication is for softening the sentence and doesn't change the need for followup. Although from another angle, this could be due to the context that chinese sentences are longer than english sentences so I just feel like it needs more to really be a chinese sentence.

[patrickpatrick2]

Alright thanks everyone. It seems like one of those things that doesn't really have a direct english translation, but I think I get the concept. I hadn't ever seen an example of "verb＋了＋verb" before, so I just wanted to make sure it was intentional rather than getting confused trying to translate a typo.