第一百四十三天

[nnozomi]

语法
要 + noun for "want something". (Why are all the 要 meanings on one page when 了 is so spread out? First quarter of the page today, anyway)
https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/Auxiliary_verb_%22yao%22_and_its_multiple_meanings

词汇
喝, to drink, a nice straightforward verb (pinyin in tags)
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-1-word-list/

Guardian:
你不知道，他们要的是我 you don't understand, it's me they want
沈老师，外面太阳大，喝口水吧 Professor Shen, it's so sunny out, have some water
你什么时候开始喝... since when do you drink?
(Interestingly, Shen Wei uses 喝 with 粥, congee, which I would have thought of as 吃. I guess it's soup in his mind? 药, medicine, seems to go with both 吃 (for pills) and 喝 (for medicinal tea etc.).)

Me:
我真要巧克力，但是会坚持。
你喝不喝热茶？

Comments

[nnozomi]

the 喝点粥 line might happen to be in the middle of a sequence of scenes I have watched way too many times (LTR season 2-15...). At least it's good for my vocabulary?

and that's actually a good metric, along with the spoon vs chopsticks cathyw proposes above! If you can slurp it, it's 喝 rather than 吃?

(also laughing at the "escalating soup/sandwich/salad wildness" in your comment below)

[trobadora]

I've also been thinking about the 喝/吃 distinction. I feel like in German, the distinction is between lifting a vessel to your mouth and drinking, vs. taking something from a vessel (either with your fingers or an utensil) and eating. So you can either eat or drink soup, depending. Not sure if that's objectively correct, but calling it drinking when there's a spoon involved feels wrong to me. Either way, it's even more frustrating not to have any sense of where the line is in Chinese ... *grumpy*

[grayswandir]

I was at first thinking this was the distinction for English, too, but then thinking about it further... I feel like soup may be a unique case? I can't actually think of anything else that you can both eat and drink in English. Like, if you put coffee into a bowl with a spoon, I'd still say you were "drinking" it. I can't imagine anyone saying someone was "eating water" or "eating tea," even if they were using a soup spoon. Would it be the same in German?

[trobadora]

Hm. I wouldn't say "eat" if you tried to consume your coffee all with a spoon, but I wouldn't call it drinking either? I would never say "they ate/drank a spoonful of coffee"; I'd use some sort of circumlocution to avoid the verb. *g* And with water it would be so strange to do, I might say something like "they tried to eat their water with a spoon" just to get across the weirdness.

... That doesn't really help, does it?

[elenothar]

Ahhh, yes, I immediately recall which scene you're talking about XD The 15s are both good.