In the same way that English-speaking students often use too many repeated pronouns in their Chinese sentences (see back to tip #4), which makes their Chinese sound rather verbose and as if it has been sautéed in a glaze of ‘English’, students also have a marked tendency to often use too many 是 in their sentences. Whereas the verb ‘to be’ occurs all over the place in English, with a multitude of uses, Chinese 是 is used a little more sparingly. So, here are some contexts in which you can safely ‘drop the 是 (‘slash the 是’?) when you’re tempted to use it:
‘SLASH THE 是’:
(i) with numeral predicates, such as:
– when talking about age
e.g. 你[NO 是]几岁？
e.g. 我[NO 是]二十三岁。
– when talking about measures / weights
e.g. 他[NO 是]一米八。 ‘He’s 1.8m tall.’
e.g. 水[NO 是]两公里深。 ‘The water is 2km deep.’
(ii) with prices / money
e.g. 这件衣服[NO 是]二十六快。
(iii) with times
e.g. 现在[NO 是]几点了？
e.g. 现在[NO 是]三点半。
e.g. 今天[NO 是]星期几？
(iv) with scalar adjectives
e.g. 我的学校[NO 是]非常大。 [UNLESS you are wanting to emphasise that the statement is true i.e. ‘No, you’re wrong, our university IS really big.’
(v) when giving a ‘rate’ or ‘equivalence’
e.g. 一天[NO 是]四季 ‘a day is 4 seasons / 4 seasons in a day’
e.g. 一天[NO 是]二十四个小时 ‘A day is (made up of) 24 hours.’
(vi) sometimes in colloquial speech when saying where you are from, the 是 gets dropped (in linguistics, we call his a ‘null-copula sentence’)
e.g. 我[NO 是]中国人。
So, next time you are writing out some Chinese sentences, go back and check whether you really do need each 是 you’ve written.
中文秘诀 | The Secret of Chinese 