Mandarin Chinese Verbs
In this lesson you’ll learn how to say three basic verbs in Mandarin Chinese: Want, Buy and Like and related gramar. After this lesson you’ll have the basic skills to go out shopping and speak Chinese! What’s great about learning the verbs in Mandarin Chinese is that there are no complicated tenses or conjugations as there are in English and other western European languages. Also, you’ll see that the word order of these sentences is the same as English, which will make your life much easier!
The first words you’ll learn in the lesson are wǒ (我) and nǐ (你). Check out my previous lesson personal pronouns to review this vocabulary.
Next you’ll learn how to say “to want”: yào (要). Make sure you get the fourth tone right. Next you’ll learn how to say “what”: shén me (什么). Notice the me has a neutral tone. Thus, it does not rise or fall.
Now you’ll learn how to make a sentence. nǐ yào shén me? (你要什么?). Wǒ yào kā fēi (我要咖啡.)
You can also say, Wǒ yào chá (我要茶).
Now you’ll learn how to say, “I want to buy”. Do do this you first say wǒyào, I want. Then you’ll need to add the verb for “to buy”: mǎi (买). Notice it uses the third tone. If you switch to the fourth falling tone you get mài (卖), which means, “to sell”.
The final verb you’ll learn here is “to like”: xǐhuān (喜欢). So, to say “What do you like?” you say, ní xǐ huān shén me? (你喜欢什么). An example of a response to that question would be, “I like coffee”, or wǒ xǐ huān kā fēi (我喜欢咖啡).
Now you can practice these Chinese sentences and verbs many times with Benny’s fantastic YouTube video!