How to use 难
难 + Verb
难 before an action verb can describe how difficult something is to do. The thing being evaluated commonly appears as the sentence's subject, while the following verb identifies the challenging activity. A degree word such as 很 may modify the resulting description when the speaker evaluates the amount of difficulty.
Some combinations with sensory verbs have conventional evaluative meanings instead. Familiar forms concerning eating, hearing, smelling, or seeing can describe unpleasant taste, sound, smell, or appearance. Do not build a literal difficulty meaning solely from the individual characters in such words. When discussing a practical obstacle to carrying out an action, choose wording that makes that obstacle clear rather than relying on an ambiguous sensory compound.
Examples with pinyin and English
这句话很难懂。
This sentence is hard to understand.
汉语很难学。
Mandarin is hard to learn.
中国菜很难做。
Chinese food is hard to make.
这个东西现在很难买。
This thing is really difficult to purchase now.
What to remember
- Use 难 before an action to describe difficulty.
- Learn common sensory compounds as whole words.
- Degree words can modify the resulting description.
Practise the pattern
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Source and editorial notes
Explanation rewritten for Laowai. Examples are adapted from the Laowai English grammar curriculum, with editorial corrections where needed. The original curriculum credits AllSet Learning’s Chinese Grammar Wiki as used with permission. Read the retained source credits.
Difficulty labels describe the level of the explanation; they are not official HSK placement. Send a correction with this page’s URL.