In English, you use “Should have”, "Could have” or “Would have”
to talk about something that didn’t happen in the past
to, maybe, express regret or other feelings.
But in Chinese, we don’t have tenses to express
information that is contrary to reality,
so how exactly do we do that?
In this video, you’ll learn how to express
“Should have”, "Could have” and “Would have” in Chinese.
哈囉，大家好！ 哈啰，大家好！
I’m Grace from Grace Mandarin Chinese.
In this video, you’ll learn how to use Chinese to express regret,
criticize others for something they did or didn’t do,
and talk about possibilities in the past, which is something
that could have or would have happened but didn’t.
Before learning the sentence patterns and expressions,
we need to first know that, since Chinese doesn’t have tenses
to help express counterfactual information,
we often understand this layer of meaning by context, for example,
If you say “我應該跟你去” without any context,
people would normally interpret the meaning as
“I should go with you”
but if the context is like this:
Here, because of the context,
we know she’s talking about a past event
so the listener can interpret this sentence as
“I should’ve come with you”.
So remember we can express counterfactual information just by context.
However sometimes contexts are unclear,
so in order to let others know we’re talking about counterfactual information,
often we’ll use hypothetical conjunctions like 如果 or 要是
with time words like 昨天、去年、上禮拜,
or adverbs like 真、本來、原本
or sentence-final particles like 的 or 了
to help listeners to understand,
so now let’s learn more about them!
Let’s start with expressing regret in Chinese.
In English, you can use “should have” to express regret
for something you did or didn’t do in the past.
Now let’s take a look at how to express it in Chinese:
To say “I should have gone to the concert with you”, you can say…
In Chinese to say “I should have…”
we often say “我應該......的”
This 的 at the end is to add a tone of certainty to the sentence
because when we look back to our past,
we often become certain about what the best choice was for us.
However, if the context is clear enough, “的” is optional.
Here is another example,
To say “I should have told you earlier”, you can say…
Here, “早一點” is a common phrase meaning “earlier” or “sooner”,
often it’d be shortened into “早點”.
So you can say 「我應該早點告訴你的」
Remember this pattern「我應該早點...... 的」
means “I should have… earlier”
You can also add the adverbs “真 (really)” before “應該”
to strengthen the tone of regret,
so you can say 「我真應該早點告訴你的」
Another commonly used phrase to express regret in Chinese is
“早知道”
It expresses the meaning of “If I had known…”,
and it’s usually used in an informal setting
and expresses a strong feeling of regret. For example,
Often you can just say “早知道（我）就...”
to express “I should have…”. For example,
Often, the 話 would be dropped. We’ll say “早知道我就聽你的了”
You can also drop the subject 我 and say “早知道就聽你的了。”
To negate the sentence, you can say…
Add the negation word before the verb.
Now let’s learn how to criticize others
for something they did or didn’t do in Chinese.
Remember? We can use “我應該...（的）”
to express “I should have…”.
Now we just need to change the subject of the sentence to
“你 you”, “他 he / 她 she” or even a person’s name “小明 Xiaoming”.
Let’s see an example,
To say “You should have been nicer to him”, you can say…
Another example,
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Now let’s learn how to talk about past possibilities.
When you want to express that something could have happened but it didn’t.
In Chinese, there are two adverbs often used: 本來 and 原本,
both of them mean “originally”. They are often used with 可以 or 能 (can)
So the sentence pattern is
S + 本來 / 原本 (originally) + 可以 / 能 (can) ……
For example,
本來 can also be placed before the subject, so you can say…
Another example,
Here it’s the same,
原本 can also be placed before the subject, so you can say…
If you’d like to express that you wanted to do something but didn’t,
you can use this phrase:
本來 / 原本 (originally) + 想 (want)
For instance,
If you want to express that had things been different in the past,
there would have been a different result.
You can use this sentence pattern…
We use a hypothetical conjunction “如果” or “要是"
with a past time word "當時" or “那時候” to talk about a hypothetical situation in the past
and an imagined result.
For example,
So you didn’t actually buy the car, this is just an imagined result.
Another example,
Here it’s the same, we use 要是 (if) and 那時候 (at that time)
to talk about a hypothetical situation in the past and an imagined result.
Alright, so now you’ve learned many ways
to talk about hypothetical scenarios in the past.
Here is the concept I want you to take away from today’s lesson:
In Chinese, we don’t have tenses like in English
to help express counterfactual information,
like you can use “should have”, “could have” and “would have”
to talk about past events that didn’t actually happen,
so since we don’t have tenses,
the way we do it is by using hypothetical conjunctions, time words,
adverbs or sentence-final particles to help convey this.
If the context is clear enough then we don’t even need these elements.
Okay, that’s all for today!
如果你喜歡今天的影片， 如果你喜欢今天的影片，
別忘記按讚、訂閱和分享哦！ 别忘记按赞、订阅和分享哦！
And also if you’d like to learn some daily Mandarin expressions,
check out my Instagram @gracemandarin
那我們就下次見囉！拜拜！ 那我们就下次见啰！拜拜！ See you next time! Bye!