2-character words turn into 1-character words?

[HHov]

Hello everybody!

 

I have been studying Mandarin since about half a year now. Although it's slow, I'm enjoying it very much and plan to continue studying

In addition to learning vocabuly and other "regular" studying, I've now been watching Chinese tv shows as well.

To be fair, at my level I don't understand most of what's being said, but still I do pick up some words.

This brings me to my question, because there appears to be a discrepancy between the vocabulary I learn, and the way natives use the words. To illustrate this, I'll give an example.

 

In the word list for HSK 3, there is the word 帮忙 (bāngmáng), which roughly means "to help".

However, in the television shows, they most often abbreviate this to 帮 (bāng).

From this, I deduce that both 帮忙 and 帮 have the same meaning.

 

Obviously, this is not only the case for this word, but holds true for a huge amount of vocabulary.

 

This confuses me. Is there a way to know which words can be abbreviated like this?

Also, do you guys have problems when just hearing the first character of a two-character word that you've learned?

 

Anyway, I hope you can clear this up for me!

Thanks in advance,

 

HHov

 

 

[Guest123]

It can be 帮、帮忙、帮助 - roughly the same meaning. But it is not an abbreviation. Some words are made of one character, some of two or three or even more. Chinese words are different combinations of characers which have their own meanings, and these meanings change more or less in different combinations. And I'm afraid the best way to know which characters can be used alone or in combination with other characters is to learn them... 

 

One thing that can help is learning the meaning of each character and understanding verb structure. If it's verb-object structure, verb can be used alone. 帮忙 （帮你的忙) can be translated like "helping to your activity, it's a sort of extention of 帮 which simply means "help"; or 吃饭 - eating food (cooked rice), and 吃 - just "eating"

If it's verb-complement of result, meaning would change: 找  - to look for, 找到 - to find; 打 - to hit, 打破 - to hit and break, damage.

Don't thing chinese two or three character words like fixed units similar to english words  

[GordonYG]

The difference between 帮忙 and 帮助 is that the characters in the former breaks down into "help with/an activity" and the other breaks down into "help/support". The verb-noun pair is used more like some phrasal verbs in English (beat up, look up) though it's a noun at the end. The verb-verb pair, especially if the two are similar as in 帮助, is really just a doubling up for emphasis, like 帮帮。 

 

​I agree with Edita that it can be helpful to break down phrases into character components to help you figure out how it's used.