Grammar: A is not (nearly) as good as B

[ymillion]

I find myself (way too) often using 比 and 比較 to for comparison. And it just occurred to me, I don't know how to do:

A is not as good as B

A (還）不如 B （好）

Does that work?

 

What about if I want to emphasize that A is much worse than B (inversely, B is much better than A).

 

A 不幾乎如 B （好）

 

謝謝！

[Tiana]

A is not as good as B:

Your example should be ok.

I tend to use: A 没有 B 好

 

A is much worse than B:

A 比 B 差得多

[anonymoose]

There are lots of ways to do this. Some are used more in spoken language, others more in written language.

 

A好，B不好。

B没有A好。

B不如A。

B远不如A。

A比B好。

A比B好很多。

A好于B。

B逊于A。

B不能和A相提并论。

跟A相比，B就相形见绌。

[Guest123]

 

 

 不幾乎如 

It sounds as if you recently have been studying classical chinese 

[Xiao Kui]

This is the way my Chinese friends and l like to say it:

A 没有 B 那么好  

Same as the above suggestions but I often hear people add 那么

[ymillion]

Thanks for the replies.

 

It's interesting, my first reaction was to write: A 沒有 B 那麼好。

But I feel this is very casual/colloquial, so I wanted something a bit more appropriate for written. I also find that I get bored of hearing my own Chinese, because I tend to repeat certain patterns a lot, as those are what I know...

 

A 沒有 B 好 seems like a good safe choice for now. And Edita, I will admit I got that from google translate, which really shouldnt be spitting out classical chinese.

[anonymoose]

You can say both A 沒有 B 那麼好 and A 沒有 B 好, but note that they have different implications. The latter is more like a neutral statement "A is not as good as B", but it doesn't tell you anything about how good either A or B are, only that B is better than A. They might both be very good, or both be very bad. On the other hand, the 那麼 in A 沒有 B 那麼好 emphasises that B is exceptionally good, and just that A doesn't reach the same standard, although it may also be good.

[Guest123]

Well, you shoud be carefull with Google translate. It's actually spitting all and everything, classical and non classical, because it's all in the same dictionary. And, as Google translate is a mashine, it's unable to make distictions. 

Try Google search, and you probably won't find such expression. 

You can meet the expression (quite literary) 几乎 - nearly, almost, 如 - as; for ex. 几乎如新 almost like new.

But there is no 不几乎 in modern language, but only 几乎不 meaning "hardly ever, hardly seems"; 几乎不可能 - nearly impossible

 

不几乎 can be found in classical chinese, but there 几 and 乎 meanings are different.

[Guest123]

I mean the use of 几and乎 in classical chinese and in modern mandarin is different ....