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I know 多 means many. But in some cases, it is used as in this sentence, such as this one: "多好看啊!" How exactly does it work? Thanks!

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  • I don't know how exactly does it work, but 多 means very here.
    – Rui
    Apr 17, 2014 at 19:27

8 Answers 8

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Chinese words or characters are best not to be thought of as having specific meanings but rather of having a concept or a general meaning.

So in the case of 多 anything that roughly means many, a lot, very (like Rui said) can work

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I prefer to the meaning as "how", because here's a hiding sense of trying to remind others to pay attention to, so

"多好看啊!"

can be translated to

"How beautiful (it is)!"

According to 在线新华字典,

多 duō【副】means 多么〖how〗, 用在感叹句里,表示程度很高。如:你看人家做得多好!

(多 as adv, means how, used in exclamatory sentence to indicate the high level of sth. Such as : To see how well others have done!)

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  • In my opinion, this should be the top answer. It's the only one that gives a reference. And the 多么 connection is important to highlight.
    – Becky 李蓓
    Dec 2, 2019 at 4:35
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“多好看啊”=“多么好看啊” “多漂亮啊”=“多么漂亮啊” “多热闹啊”=“多么热闹啊” etc... In this sentense, It means "very" but not "many" Regards!

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What an adorable baby!

How beautiful it is!

Yes like songyuanyao said 多 is used in exclamatory sentence to indicate the high level. I'm a native speaker of Mandarin.

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In this context, I believe that 多 is short for 多 么. The 么 changes the meaning of 多 from "much" to "how much." Thus, 多 (么) 好看啊 would mean "how (much) good looking!"

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Simply put, 多 works as an adverb in this sentence to indicate the level of the adjective (好看 good-looking), therefore literally it means many good-looking, or in English term, very good-looking --> very pretty.

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It's like the "so" in "So pretty!"

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  • 1
    This is the correct answer which is so simple, so easy to understand. 简单、 易懂的答案。 May 7, 2014 at 3:19
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1st of all, u need to understand how chinese word work.

多好看,basically this sentence base on english word theory we can seperate into 2, which is 多好 and 看

多好mean very,great,better 看,say u know, that was straight forward, 'look'

but if we direct translate to english, it will be trouble, because when u replace above into sentence, you will get very look, great look (this make sense for you, maybe), better look, yet does not represent the actually mean, the actual mean is look nice

for example : 你穿这衣服多好看

if we direct translate u you get

you dress this cloth better look / great look / better look

the correct sentence should be you look nice via this dressing ( and so on)

this is because the statement build for chineese and english is totally different, so sometime when we use the google translate, lot of them are make no sense.

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