我也想找男朋友

Text

Note: The text is pasted here in case you want to copy/paste one of the words into a dictionary app, but the above video and zip file download are best inputting the content as they have audio and text-tracking.

A: 你听说了吗？小美有男朋友了！

B: 你是单身吗？

A: 你不知道吗？我一直都是单身，没有男朋友。

B: 因为你长得这么好看，我还以为你早就有男朋友了。没想到你还是单身。

A: 我也想找。有什么办法可以找到一个对我又好长得又好看的男朋友呢？

B: 这很简单！你多发一点自己的自拍照片到手机上。那些没有女朋友的男生看到了，就可以给你联系了。如果有你喜欢的，你们就可以去约约会，吃吃饭。

A: 可是我最近常常加班，哪有时间去约会。

B: 对！ 你每天加班这么累，都没有时间交朋友。

A: 下班以后我只想回去休息。对我来说，和别人聊天很累。

Top-Down Words

知道 zhīdào - to know
都 dōu - all, every
就 jiù- (expressing condition “then”)
呢 ne - (particle expressing inquisitiveness)
男生 nánshēng - boy, young man
就  jiù- (expressing condition “then”)
常常 chángcháng - often, frequently
都 dōu - all, every
聊天 liáotiān - to chat

How to Use This Lesson

Step One

Watch the video here on the course platform. Feel free to take as much time as you'd like to understand the content, but don't feel obligated to understand the text right now fully. You'll download the video and return to it later. 

Step Two

Download the zip file from the sidebar (desktop/laptop) or below this description (Mobile APP). That zip file contains the following:

• Text tracking video(s) MP4 file(s)
• Audio MP3 file(s)
• Image file of the text & top-down words for your reference

Dialogues contain one text-tracking video file at 80% speed followed by native speed. 

Opinions & Short Stories contain two text tracking video files, one female voice, and one male voice. Both start at 80% speed, followed by native speed.

Step Three

At a time of your choosing, use the video files to practice shadowing. If you need a reminder, this lesson explains how to shadow. These video files are ideal for shadowing, especially if you download them to your phone because you can walk around while doing it.

Click Here to Navigate to All Phase 4 Dialogues, Opinions & Stories

Member Comments from 2019-mid-2020

Do you also want to leave a comment? You can do so below！

William Beeman

HI in:
有什么办法可以找到一个对我又好长得又好看的男朋友呢

The phrase 又好长得又好看(的) seems redundant to describe the desired boyfriend. I get that he should be "good looking" but this seems to be kind of stated twice. Can you explain how these coordinated phrases work together?

Mandarin Blueprint

Here's an answer for you, William:

https://www.loom.com/share/1f1026bb868640939e6bbc1218fa7cd7

有什么办法可以找到一个Verb Phrase又好Verb Phrase又好看的男朋友呢

有什么办法可以找到一个对我又好长得又好看的男朋友呢

MB Team 

Here's the link to where Phil and Luke talked about this comment in the Mandarin Blueprint Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYhgM_RlcP4&t=983s

---

William Beeman

Thanks so much for your elegant explanation. It was very helpful. Just so you know, I am doing this course to get enough Chinese under my belt to do some comparative lingusitics, but I find I am having a great deal of fun, so it is really a pleasure. And you guys' enthusiasm for the language and explanations of grammatical points are really enjoyable and informative. I'm sorry I couldn't study with your excellent professors. I'll be glad to share some of my research topics with you some day if you are interested,

Mandarin Blueprint

Great to hear. And yes, please do share!

MB Team

This is where Luke and Phil talked about your question in the Mandarin Blueprint Podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnVp_b_LlqY&t=3311s

---

William Beeman

Well, you asked, so here is way more than you wanted to find out. :-) Ignore if it is too boring (but not to me).

I'm a linguistic anthropologist, so my concern is with language use and "pragmatics."

My immediate project is to compare Chinese, Japanese and Arabic morphology to try and show that grammatical form classes, based on Western (Indo-European) languages (noun, verb. etc.) are too rigid. Chinese is really ideal for this exploration because of the fluidity of its morphology, So many morphemes in Chinese can serve multiple grammatical functions, we need some new conceptual categories to encompass them. By the way, this is also true of American Indian languages where "nouns" are expressed as "verbs" and vice versa, so in Shawnee the English sentence: "The stone fell" would be most accurately rendered as "Stoning (happens) in a downward direction"

My ongoing project deals with grammatical aspect (how an action extends over time--imperfect, perfect), and modality (the attitude of a speaker/writer toward what they are expressing) in language. I am still not confident enough to tackle this in Chinese, but it is really exciting to explore these two dimensions of expression in Chinese. There has been some research on this, but the field is really wide open. I have written about this in Japanese, Persian, Indonesian (Javanese), Arabic and German. So working with Chinese is immensely engaging as another comparative dimension for human language.

Finally, I have written a great deal about hierarchy in language. Language levels expressing status and class differences are hugely interesting. We can start with the 你／您 (Nǐ/nín) distinction and then the topic explodes from there, and has hardly been dealt with in non-Chinese literature. Chinese kinship terms which are hierarchical in the extreme. I don't know if MB folks are aware of the enormous range of kinship terms in Chinese with older/younger and lineal/affinal distinctions, but one of my predecessors, the great linguist Yuen Ren Chao wrote a definitive article on Chinese kinship and address forms some years ago. It needs to be updated to improve the transliteration and include hanzi characters, but it is still fascinating.

Chao, Yuen Ren. 1956. “Chinese Terms of Address.” Language 32 (1): 217–241.

An exploration of "polite" speech/behavior 礼貌 (lǐmào) is also a wide-open field of inquiry. The first character of lǐmào can be glossed as "etiquette" (I'd appreciate an opinion on this) but look at the second character made up of "badger" and "appearance!" What's up witth that? How does the badger get into this mix? (More research needed).

So I am very sorry that I am not much younger, coming to Chinese shows that there is an infinitude of interesting things to explore, and I am finding it enormously enjoyable.

Again, I apologize for a long-winded explanation of my interests. I hope it isn't too "academic" for readers of the forum.

 MB Team

This is where Luke and Phil talked about your question in the Mandarin Blueprint Podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnVp_b_LlqY&t=3340s