Hello everyone,
I’m Grace!
Welcome back to my channel!
A couple of weeks ago,
I made a video analyzing Mark Zuckerberg’s Chinese
and many people found this type of video very useful,
and some people recommended that I analyze Jonn Cena's Chinese.
So here we are today. Let’s see what we can learn from his Chinese.
Let’s go!
You know,
because I watched many videos about John Cena speaking Chinese,
right now his theme song is repeatedly playing in my head.
OK, anyway,
today I also want to analyze John Cena’s Chinese
to talk about some common mistakes that students often make.
First, let’s take a look at a clip of an interview with John Cena:
He said:
Here I want to point out two things.
The first one is about pronunciation,
sometimes he pronounced “you” like “yao”.
Here I have a tip for you to help you easily distinguish “ou” and “ao”.
These two are compound finals in Chinese.
I think the pinyin of them is not really helpful for you to learn their correct pronunciation,
so let’s take a look at their IPA, international phonetic alphabet,
which can help us to know how to accurately pronounce these sounds.
So the first one is the IPA of “ou”.
Yes, It’s the same as that in pinyin.
The second one is the IPA of “ao”.
Can you find out the difference between them?
The only difference is their first vowel. They both end with “u” sound.
“ou” starts with o, o, “ou”.
And “ao” starts with a, a, “au”.
So “ou” is “o” plus “u”, “ou”, “ou”.
And “ao” is “a” plus “u”, “ao”, “ao”.
OK, after you get this rule and practice a bit,
you can easily pronounce these accurately.
Next, I want to talk about this word “變成”, he said:
He wanted to say “you will become successful”,
so he said “你會變成成功”.
This is a common mistake that many students make
because in the dictionary, 變成 is usually translated into “become”,
but actually you cannot use 變成 to say “become” in every context.
Like in this example, you cannot say “你會變成成功”.
The grammatically correct sentence should be “你會變成功”
or “你會變得成功”,
but we usually would just say “你會成功 you will succeed”.
If you want to figure out how to correctly say “become” in Chinese,
I will do a video about that and it will come out next week, so stay tuned.
OK, let’s move on to another clip:
OK in this clip I also want to point out two things.
Firstly, I want to talk about the measure words.
In this clip, he said “四個年” meaning “four years”
In Chinese, before a noun,
if you want to add a number word or words like “this” or “that”,
In most cases, you have to use a measure word to connect them with the noun.
That’s right.
However, when the noun is related to time,
some of them can be measure words by themselves,
so you don’t have to add another measure word.
These are the words:
Before these words,
you don’t have to add any measure word, like “個”.
So when you want to say “four years”,
instead of saying “四個年”, you should say “四年”.
Another thing I want to mention is about “can” in Chinese.
He said:
So here he said: 我可以說中文 I can speak Chinese,
which is understandable,
but when you want to say you have the ability to do something,
and this thing is a skill that you need to acquire,
then you should use “會” instead of “可以”.
For example, you can say
煮飯 cooking
開車 driving
彈吉他 playing guitar
說中文 speaking Chinese
are all skills that you have to learn.
So remember, when you want to say you have a skill that you have acquired,
then you use “會” instead of “可以”.
So next time if someone asks you: Do you speak Chinese?,
you can reply 我會說中文.
OK, that’s all for today,
if you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs-up,
and don’t forget, next week we will tackle a very common mistake,
which is how to say “become” in Chinese accurately.
Alright, I will see you next week, bye!