Translation please! (an easy one!)

[adrianlondon]

Well, it's beyond me, but I still think it should be easy

I'm looking through a recent MSN chat I had with a lad in Shanghai. He can't speak English so there's no point in me asking him what he meant. I sort of guessed the meaning and carried on the conversation. Anyway ...

我也没有帮上什么忙！

If you need context, he had offered to help me learn Mandarin when I go to China and I asked him if he was interested in learning English.

[skylee]

Since it is an easy one, I would give it a try. It means, "I haven't helped much/at all", probably in response to your thanking him.

[chenpv]

I don't know how to translate this sentence. Anyhow, I will give a try:

So is ' I didn't help much.' acceptable in English for that sentence?

[adrianlondon]

It's the 什么忙 bit that threw me (and still does!).

[HashiriKata]

Ok, let me try:

帮忙 means to help. Unlike the word "help" in English, it consists of the verb 帮 and the noun 忙.

So, pretend that the Chinese is equivalent to "give" + "help", you can say "(I didn't give) any help/ 什么忙", where 什么 is equivalent to "any" here.

[adrianlondon]

Aha - I see. Thanks for that.

I thought 帮 or 帮助 was help and that 忙 just meant "busy".

Another line from my MSN history is, once I said I was at work :

那你先忙你的工作吧。

I can understand it, but I didn't realise 忙 could be used like that.

I recommend chatting with random people via MSN as a great learning experience

[adrianlondon]

Checking via the fantastic http://hmarty.free.fr/hanzi/, I can now see the subtle differences between 帮助 and 帮忙。 I can work out the sentence now; I was incorrectly treating 忙 as an independent word.

[deezy]

I recommend chatting with random people via MSN as a great learning experience

How do you go about finding these people on MSN, or Yahoo?

[adrianlondon]

同志，

I find mine through web sites linked to my sexuality

You might want to find your own methods ... I'm sure MSN has "rooms" - you could probably find one dedicated to people in a certain city, pick people at random, and see who's interested in chatting.

[JonasL]

那你先忙你的工作吧。

那 = then

先 = first

忙你的工作 = do what you have to do at work

吧 = a particle to soften the tone of a sentence

so probably he meant something like "first mind your work ( then we'll chat )"

[adrianlondon]

Hiya - yeah, thanks for that. I did understand what he was saying; it was just the word order which was new to me.

Considering all my learning has been based on Practical Chinese Reader, some communist inspired 70s story of unrequited lesbian love between a chinese girl and a blond haired albanian, it's really useful to hear some "real world" experience :-)

[JonasL]

the book with 马大为 和 王小云?