第二年第三十五天

[nnozomi]

语法
是 + （来/去 +） ...的, "(coming/going) to do something"
https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/The_%22shi..._de%22_construction_for_indicating_purpose

词汇
船, ship (pinyin in tags)
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-2-word-list/

Guardian:
我是来报到的, I'm here to report
你是来找我的吗, are you here to look for me?
当年天外飞船着陆海星, back when the spaceship landed on Haixing

Me:
因为她是去东京跟客户见面的，所以她周三才回来。
他不能坐船，他会胃疼。

Comments

[trobadora]

船, ship

Oh look, another word I only know because Zhu Yilong sang a song that one time ... *g*

*sings* 当一艘船沉入海底 ...

[sakana17]

XD I can relate...

[trobadora]

*high fives*

[nnozomi]

*sings* 当一艘船沉入海底 ...
Oh yes, of course! And he's even kind enough to throw in the counting word. Chalk another one up for that well-known textbook 跟朱一龙一起学中文吧 ;)

[grayswandir]

Oh, huh! I've only ever heard 一只船, which seems to be used in Mandarin as well, as far as I can see. I hadn't heard of 艘 before at all! I wonder if that's the more literary classifier, and maybe 只 is more casual/conversational? (And then Wiktionary tells me you can also use 条...)

[nnozomi]

I love 条, it's so flexible ;)

I hadn't heard of 艘 before at all! I wonder if that's the more literary classifier, and maybe 只 is more casual/conversational?
Works for me. Given the radical I guess 艘 is ship-specific, and 只 is of course more general...

[trobadora]

Seriously! It makes the classifiers so much easier to remember when they're served up like this. *g*

[trobadora]

Oh, good question! I've definitely heard 一艘船 in a drama at least once (after I knew the song, so I noticed), but I don't remember where, and now I'm wondering ...

[nnozomi]

So I asked my Chinese conversation partner (a 北京人 for context), and her answer was 一条小船，一艘大船. (She said 一只 sounded less familiar.) So it depends if you're talking about a rowboat or a battleship?

[nnozomi]

See also 扮演着一条龙, 经过多少练习才会重燃这一颗心 and so on ;)

[trobadora]

Yes! Or 怎么去拥有一道彩虹, since I was already quoting that song. *g*

[grayswandir]

Interesting! Thanks for asking about it. The 条 vs. 艘 difference definitely sounds useful to know. Though that makes it rather funny that Wiktionary's only usage example for 艘 is "一艘小船": "a small boat." XD

I just went back to look these words up again after seeing your comment, wondering whether the dictionaries I'd checked were wrong and 只 wasn't actually used in Mandarin. Looking at the actual sentence examples provided in Pleco, I see now that all the Canto examples have 只, and all the Mandarin examples have 艘 or (much more rarely) 条. But then why do even the Mandarin dictionaries list 只 as a classifier??

Going a bit further down this rabbit hole, I tried googling, and the boat/ship distinction for 艘/条 seems clear, but it looks like there's less agreement about what to do with 只. *sigh* This question on HiNative has a couple of answers saying that 艘/条/只 is the order from biggest to smallest. One person sees 只 as being for something tiny like a paper boat. But then someone else says "Actually, they mean the same thing and we often use them randomly," and claims that 只 is the one most commonly used in everyday speech and that 条 is the rarest one. This page on Baidu says that technically only 艘 is correct, regardless of boat/ship size, and both 条 and 只 are colloquial usages. Someone in the comments expresses surprise that their child's school paper was marked wrong for the answer "一只小船," which the teacher corrected to "一条小船."

The conclusion I'm drawing is that 只 must be colloquial/regional/dialectical. It's the only word I've heard used for any size ship in Cantonese, and apparently at least some Mandarin speakers use it, but given your conversation partner's comment, it sounds like it may not be something people in Beijing say at all...

[trobadora]

Thank you for the research and the write-up, that is fascinating! :D

[nnozomi]

This is great! Thank you very much. (I love the idea of separate counters for little tiny toy boats, even if it doesn't actually work that way.)
只 must be colloquial/regional/dialectical. It's the only word I've heard used for any size ship in Cantonese, and apparently at least some Mandarin speakers use it, but given your conversation partner's comment, it sounds like it may not be something people in Beijing say at all...
Yeah--I guess geographically it would make sense if it's more common among southern Mandarin speakers? as an overflow from Cantonese...

[nnozomi]

一石两鸟 :)