Chinese Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for students, teachers, and linguists wanting to discuss the finer points of the Chinese language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
This is an example sentence in my textbook:
"建立良好的人际关系，是每个社会人的精神需要"
精神 is translated in the dictionary into "spirit, mind, consciousness". Here I believe it must be modifying 需要, which is acting as a noun.
Spiritual need? This translation seems right, but feels weird because nothing about "人际关系" (interpersonal relationships) is "spiritual" to me.
"Spiritual needs" is a typical word-to-word translation that is common in texts translated from Chinese but does not fit in the English context. You may consider other words such as "psychological" or "mental".
Similarly, for "物质需要", I think "physical needs" is better than "material needs".
In Chinese when you see "精神" modifying nouns to form phrases such as "精神需要" and "精神文明", it just means the opposite side of their material counterpart such as "物质需要" and "物质文明".
So your translation of "spiritual" is correct, but you need to understand it from a different point of view as I stated above.
how about "needs of cultural goods"?
