Translating the word 'for' into Chinese

[Caladriusse91]

This sounds like a pretty basic question, and at my level I should know it but recently I have been stopping midway through conversation and explanations from certain teachers have made get into a muddle about this.

 

There are obviously some words in English, that when translated to Chinese, require you to think because there is more than one way to translate it.

 

A basic example is 'to can' which can be translated to 会 hui, 能 neng, and 可以 keyi.

 

I never had any difficulty with this though because I was told that hui = learned ability, keyi = basically when you use the 'may' (ask for permission), and neng = all other instances.

 

Another example is 'to play' but that is easy too because in Chinese the differentiation is based on what part of the body - ti zuqiu, chui xiaohao etc

 

I thought I knew how to differentiate 'for', but apparently I used this incorrectly in one instance, was told about this, then got given a long explanation by a Chinese teacher (an explanation I didn't completely understand). Then I asked a Chinese friend who gave me another explanation and now I am just confused about a topic I thought I had nailed.

 

Basically I am talking about 给 gei, 为 wei, 对 dui, and now apparently 为了 weile (although I always consider it to be 'for the purpose of')

 

Some for example if you would use dui in this sentence 抽烟对身体不好

 

But in this case you would use gei 这个礼物给你.

 

Even though they are both 'for' in English.

 

Ah I am getting confused, there are just many times I am stopping in conversation to think about which to use of the four above.

 

For example if I am holding up a pair of men's trousers and I want to say 'these trousers are for men' which do I use?

 

I am wondering if I making a bigger thing over what are maybe a few fairly simple rules.

 

Could somebody (whose native language is English!) put my mind to rest and explain all this for me. Preferably with examples.

 

Thank you.

 

 

 

[Michaelyus]

"To can" ??? 把......罐装? [</facetious English verb nitpick>]

 

Your particular examples have quite straightforward ways of differentiating them in English: one of them is the construction "to be for + NOUN PHRASE" and the other is "to be + ADJECTIVE + for + NOUN PHRASE". I admit this is a pretty superficial analysis, but as a pedagogical foundation it's a s good starting point.

[anonymoose]

It may help if you stop trying to translate so literally from English into Chinese and listen to how Chinese people actually say these things.

For example, "these trousers are for men" would more literally be translated as "these are men's trousers".

[vellocet]

Your problem is that you're thinking in English and then trying to translate into Chinese.  Don't do that.  Just speak Chinese. 

[roddy]

Easier said than done when you don't speak Chinese yet. But yeah, you're over-thinking it. Maybe sit down with a good dictionary and grammar book and read up on what they have to say, pay lots of attention to how they get used in real life, and if you're not sure, take a best guess. 

[eddyf]

This is a hard question to answer. First of all, "for" is actually a really complicated English word. I looked it up in the dictionary and there were 35 definitions. No wonder it can't be easily mapped to a single Chinese word. Second of all, Chinese words like 给，对，为 are themselves also complicated and have a lot of different usages. Sometimes they can be translated as "for", and sometimes not. We could try to map out the correspondence between those 35 definitions of "for" and each of the usages of 给，对，为 but that seems like a pretty painful exercise. My suggestion (which might be a bit unhelpful) is just to get exposure to a lot of example Chinese sentences until you start getting a feel for it. For what it's worth, I feel like 给，对，为 are actually pretty different and once you get the hang of each of them, you really won't mix them up at all. It's basically just a coincidence that these 3 characters all have instances where they can be translated as "for". In your mind you should not feel like these characters are related to each other at all.