我们做父母的总是不放心

[metlx]

我们做父母的总是不放心

 

I’m struggling to understand this sentence and its structure. 

 

It translates to "We parents never stop worrying."

If I chop it into pieces:

 

We + do/make + parents + possesive de + always + not relieved

At first I thought it means "We always make parents worry"..

 

 

I just don’t understand what 做 and 的 means in this sentence. Usually there is a noun after 的, but I understand sometimes it can be omitted (e.g. 做的 ＝ those who work), however I fail to grasp what 做父母的 without a noun would mean.

 

I’d really appreciate it if anyone could explain this sentence to me. 

 

EDIT:

perhaps 做 means ’as’? We as parents never stop worrying, then still, I don’t see the need for 的 then.

我们为父母总是不放心

[Hofmann]

A noun is implied. You can think 人 but it really is just a dummy noun.

[Michael H]

做父母 means "act(ing) as parents".

 

做父母的 means "those who are acting as parents". If it helps you, you can think of this, as Hofmann suggests, as 做父母的人 with 人 omitted. But I don't think that's necessary. 的 can come after a modifier to indicate those nouns that have the given property. For example, 红的 can mean "the red one".

[metlx]

wouldn’t 我们做父母总是不放心 be a better sentence?

At least in English it sounds better:

 

"We as parents always worry" vs  "We who act as parents always worry".

This commonness of 的 in chinese sentences is sometimes so confusing to me.

[Michael H]

I think 我们做父母总是不放心 would mean "We are acting as parents and always worrying". Because now 做父母 is a verb.

 

Anyway, you can't try to carry over what sounds good in one language to the other. Otherwise you will get bad fortune cookie translations. You just have to expose yourself to a lot of Chinese input and get used to it.

[889]

It's not just looking at Chinese from an English perspective, but expecting that there's good logic and reason behind everything: "I don’t see the need for 的 then." Well, what's the need for "do" in that English sentence of yours. "I no see the need for . . ." is just as clear. Imagine how simple English would become for non-native speakers if we could get rid of that one simple word!

 

Just accept that every language has its conventions, and that colloquial language in particular sometimes defies logical analysis.

[iand]

我们做父母的总是不放心:

 

我们做父母的 is an appositive phrase. That means that 我们 and 做父母的 refer to the same thing. The English equivalent would be "we, the parents." Just as 红 can mean "to be red" and 红的 can mean "the red one," 做父母 can mean "to be parents" and 做父母的 can mean "the parents." That's a complex way of explaining it but I hope you can untwist the logic.

[eddyf]

I think it's wrong to say here that you should stop trying to analyze this sentence and just accept it. There are times when some grammatical structure just doesn't make sense and you have to get used to it. But this sentence isn't really one of those times. This sentence can be broken down and analyzed just fine. Really the only thing tripping you up is the chunk "做父母的". Simply put it just means "parents". Or more precisely, "people who are parents". Thus the piece-by-piece correspondence with the translation "We parents never stop worrying" is easy to see. In the English sentence, "we parents" means that the sentence is about all parents and "we" are a part of that group. In the Chinese sentence, "我们做父母的" means something similar.

 

You may ask why the sentence wasn't just “我们父母总是不放心". But I think this construction seems more awkward because "我们父母" sounds like it could mean "our parents" instead of "we parents". So the original construction is probably superior. 

[陳德聰]

a. 父母总是不放心

b. 我们父母总是不放心

c. 我们做父母的总是不放心

In every permutation of this sentence, the comment about whoever it is about is "always not at ease" or more idiomatically "never stop worrying". In (a), it is a blanket statement that "parents never stop worrying". In (b), as #8 suggests, there is a possible ambiguity in writing, but in speech there would not be any ambiguity, that it could mean either "Our parents never stop worrying" or "We, parents, never stop worrying". In ©, you have an appositive phrase as explained in #7, meaning only "We (who are) parents never stop worrying".

The question of whether (b) would be a "better" sentence than © is interesting but not all that useful. Consider the fact that (b) and © are both sentences, and yet you are faced with ©, not (b), so obviously © has some property to it that allows it to persist in people's speech and writing.

Think of it this way:

做翻译的 - translators (those who are translators)

做工的 - workers (those who are workers)

做老师的 - teachers (those who are teachers)

做这个行业的 - people in this industry (those who are of this industry)

Etc.

Are all reiterations of the same construction 做...的(人). 做 does not mean only "do", it also means "be", "make" etc. if you want to play the one-to-one English-Chinese correspondence game that is ultimately only going to hold you back in your understanding. But it is more useful to observe something that doesn't make sense to you and add it to the list of things that a language permits or requires, rather than think about how it doesn't fit into your personal understanding of how the language should be (based on English?).

[metlx]

thanks everyone! It is much more understandable to me now