What’s the difference between ‘Quan’ and ‘Dou’ as adv.?

What’s the difference between ‘Quan’ and ‘Dou’ as adv.?
Jan 21, 2009 02:13
KELLYDALY Points: Join Date: Jan 21, 2009 Status: offline	Who can tell the differences between ‘Quan’ and ‘Dou’? I was told they were the same and are equal to ‘all’. But many a time I was told I used one of them wrong and I should use the other one. Here is an example, I wanted to say ‘All want to go to that movie’ and said in Chinese that ‘mei ge ren quan xiang qu kan na ge dian ying.’ What’s wrong with the ‘Quan’ here? I don’t know what the point is there. Don’t that both ‘Quan’ and ‘Dou’ mean ‘all’? The answers I got was always like ‘I don’t know how to explain’ or ‘it’s complicated’ when I asked for an explanation. I got nowhere to know how to differentiate the two words and how to use them. Don’t they just mean ‘all’?

Jan 21, 2009 02:13

KELLYDALY
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Join Date: Jan 21, 2009
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Who can tell the differences between ‘Quan’ and ‘Dou’? I was told they were the same and are equal to ‘all’. But many a time I was told I used one of them wrong and I should use the other one. Here is an example, I wanted to say ‘All want to go to that movie’ and said in Chinese that ‘mei ge ren quan xiang qu kan na ge dian ying.’ What’s wrong with the ‘Quan’ here? I don’t know what the point is there. Don’t that both ‘Quan’ and ‘Dou’ mean ‘all’? The answers I got was always like ‘I don’t know how to explain’ or ‘it’s complicated’ when I asked for an explanation. I got nowhere to know how to differentiate the two words and how to use them. Don’t they just mean ‘all’?

Jan 21, 2009 02:14

MARYMACARTHY
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Join Date: Jan 21, 2009
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It’s a common mistake English-speaking learners would make. Theoretically speaking, ‘Quan’ emphasizes items as a whole and there must be a certain scope of the items before ‘Quan’ in a sentence; for instance, ‘Zhe xie ren( those people) wo (I) quan(all) xi huan.’ In this sentence, ‘ren’(a person) acts as the item and ‘zhe xie ren’ (those people) acts as the scope. As to ‘Dou’, it emphasizes every item or any part of the whole mentioned are the same. When you wanted to say ‘All want to go to that movie’ what you want to express is that every individual, not all as a whole, wants to go to that movie and you don’t have any idea in your mind whether there is a scope for the ‘all’. Now you can see you should say ‘mei ge ren dou (not quan) xiang qu kan na ge dian ying.’

Jan 21, 2009 02:15

ANNIEFREEMAN
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Join Date: Jan 21, 2009
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‘Quan’ and ‘Dou’ don’t work the same with ‘all’. Either ‘Quan’ or ‘Dou’ cannot be used as a pronoun as can ‘all’; for instance, you can say ‘all are my friends’ in English. When you say ‘They are all my friends’ where ‘all’ works as an adv., the ‘all’ in this sentence means ‘Quan’ or ‘Dou’; in Chinese, this sentence can be literally translated as ‘Ta men quan/dou shi wo de peng you.’ And you can see both ‘Quan’ and ‘Dou’ are properly used in this sentence.

Jan 22, 2009 19:24

GUEST71095

The key to understand the difference between 'quan' and 'dou' is to understand their point. 'dou' means EACH ONE/EVERY ONE in a number, while 'quan' means the whole number. For your example,you say ‘All want to go to that movie’ and said in Chinese that ‘mei ge ren quan xiang qu kan na ge dian ying.’Here 'mei ge ren' means each one/every one, so you should use "DOU".
I suggest you always use "Dou" in some uncertain cases.

Jan 22, 2009 21:03	#4
NOWORD Points: Join Date: Jan 22, 2009 Status: Offline	mei ge ren dou xiang qu kan na ge dian ying. This sentence has a mistake. It should be 'mei ge ren dou xiang qu kan na **chang dian ying'. 每个人都想去看那场**电影。 But somewhere in China, such as Shanghai, people don't care that.

Feb 1, 2009 07:24

GUEST39142

as a native chinese speaker, i cant say how to use quan and dou,just more practise, you will know how to use quan and dou.
in most occassion, quan and dou can replace each other:
qian dou shu guang le =qian quan shu guang le
ta men dou cuo le=ta men quan cuo le.
but in some circumstance , quan and dou can't be replaced, just like your example, that is a feeling about a language,read more, you will know how to use quan and dou ,just how we learn english.

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