难道 why does this mean "do you mean to say"?

[Fred0]

I would say 难道 means "hard way!" My textbook translates it as "do you mean to say."

 

I can usually see some sense in the way Chinese put characters together, but not in this case. Can anyone help me?

 

 

[imron]

I would say 难道 means "hard way!"

This is why you need to focus on learning 'words' rather than 'characters', because it absolutely doesn't mean 'hard way'.

 

难道 is used to ask rhetorical questions, usually stating/asking the opposite meaning of what you want, but with a disbelieving tone.

 

For example, say you had the sentence:

 

你看得到吗? - Can you see it?

 

Then adding 难道 (and changing 得 to 不 because of what I said above about opposites) you get:

 

难道你看不到吗?  becomes something like:  You're telling me that you can't see it?!  With an air of disbelief that the person can't see it.  That is, the person asking the question expects the person listening should be able to see whatever it is they are talking about.

[Demonic_Duck]

I'd add that although many words in Chinese are put together in a wonderfully logical way (everyone knows the classic examples like “火山”、“口水”、“爱国”、“自行车” etc. etc. etc.), not every word is put together in a way that is logical, or at least in a way that is immediately obvious as being logical.
 
In the case of “难道”, I'd suggest that the meaning of “道” probably isn't "road/path/way", it's more likely to be "say"; if that's correct, then it's not much of a stretch from the literal meaning "it's difficult to say" to "don't tell me...", "do you mean to say...", "could it be that..." or "I can't believe..." (all of which are decent idiomatic translations, depending on the exact context).

 

Edit: that's just conjecture, though. Anyone know any decent online resources for word etymology in Chinese (词源, as opposed to character etymology 字源)? I searched “词源” in Google and Baidu and the results were all either about 英语词源 or 汉字字源.

[Messidor]

There're two examples of evolution of this word: 不开寤而难道兮《楚辞·七谏》；虽然不是亲的，也是个嫂嫂，难道与我每做朋友不成？《全元南戏·杀狗记》。When the two characters first appeared side by side more than two thousand years ago they actually meant "difficult path"----two independent words coincidently used together. But by the time of Yuan Dynasty, as in the second example, they were already a single word with meaning that almost the same as it is today. The major part of the evolution is believed to have occurred during Song-Yuan Dynasty.

Well...those are just boring philology stuff... just take 难道 as an adverb with two characters forever bound together.

It's usually used in rhetorical sentences:

1)难道你不知道？ --->你肯定知道(I'm sure that you know it)

2)难道不是吗？ --->就是这样的呀(of course it is)

but sometimes it can be used in affirmative way

2)难道是发生了什么事故？ --->我猜发生了什么事故但我很希望没发生(I guess there's an accident but I hope I'm wrong)

 

btw in modern chinese most words have two or more characters (bound together), only a small portion are single-character. It's better not to divide the bound characters or analyse them; and it'll be easier to learn words with illastrations (context)

hope my post will be of some help

[Fred0]

A great help. Thank you.