Duration of actions

In Chapter 18 of Integrated Chinese, Dialogue II has a section which describes the duration of an action, and it shows two sentence formulas for it. One of the examples they give is:

她每天听绿音听一个小时。
她每天听一个小时绿音。
She listens to recordings for an hour everyday.

Both of the Chinese sentences say they same thing in slightly different ways. The first one uses verb repetition, and the formula is something like:

Subj + (how often) + verb + object + verb + (how long).

The second sentence doesn’t repeat the verb, but does put a duration of time between the verb and the object. Its formula is something like:

Subj + (how often) + verb + (how long) + (的) + object.

De (的) is apparently optional in the second type of sentence. Our teacher didn’t have much of an explanation for it, other than saying that it sometimes sounds right, and sometimes doesn’t. I guess that is something that comes with experience.

Now for some practice sentences of my own.

我每天走路走一个小时半钟。
我每天走一个小时半钟的路。
I walk for an hour and a half every day.

我每天复习中文复习三十分钟。
我每天复习三十分钟的中文。
I review Chinese for 30 minutes every day.

王朋每周六打篮球打两个小时。
王朋没周六打两个小时篮球。
Wang Peng plays basketball for two hours every Saturday.

李友每周末学习中文学习十二个小时。
李友每周末学习十二个小时中文。
Li You studies Chinese for twelve hours every weekend.

Verbs are kind of tricky in Chinese, because there are verbs and there are verb-objects. They are tricky because while some verbs are only one character, some are two characters, which means they can get confused with verb-objects, which will always have at least two characters. I guess it’s another one of those things where it will become easier to understand after I’ve learned more.

In Chapter 18 of Integrated Chinese, Dialogue II has a section which describes the duration of an action, and it shows two sentence formulas for it. One of the examples they give is: 她每天听绿音听一个小时。 她每天听一个小时绿音。 She listens to recordings for an hour everyday. Both of the Chinese sentences say they same thing in slightly different…

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