Chinese lesson, please

[liukaiqin]

Dear sinophone babes, how do you express a hypothetical in Mandarin? Would "if I had a bike I would be happy" be something like "要是我有单车，我就高兴了" or "我有单车了就开心"? Where does the 了 go? And how do you say "if I had had a bike when I was a child, I would have been happy?"

Comments

answer from a real chinese person

[anonymous]

Hi This is Derek (in Dalian)

I asked a chinese person and here s what she gave for your 2 questions:

如果我有单车,我就开心.

如果我小时候有单车,我就开心

then she offered the following about 了:
你让我翻译的都是假设的
"了" 只是语气词语而已
如果我有单车了,我就开心.
是一样的表达

Re: answer from a real chinese person

[liukaiqin]

Derek! Weird, I was just reading your blog. Maybe you spotted me. Thanks for that, say thank you to the "real chinese person" too!

[bokane]

Counterfactuals in Chinese are such a pain. There's the 假设 construction, which nobody ever uses except for stuff of the type "Suppose, just suppose..." "I wish I had a bike" is usually said as 我要有自行车该多好 or something of the sort. You could use 希望 there, but in practice I find people usually use something like the first construction.

[liukaiqin]

So is 假设 a bit pompous-sounding in normal speech?

I might just not deviate from fact much until I learn to use conditionals by osmosis or something. Still, nice that with Chinese you don't have to learn subjunctive conjugations, blech.

[liukaiqin]

BTW I'm having great fun reading what all your fans are saying at http://www.bokane.org/chinese/2006/04/27/wo-de-zhongguo-dao/#comment-69. (I hear your Chinese is quite good.) That column's the coolest thing, I'm such a fan.