When I used a translation engine to translate You are beautiful, the result was 你好漂亮.
I know that 你 means you and 漂亮 means pretty. But we is there this 好 in the middle of the sentence. It means good, well, and this doesn't fit into the sentence at all!
Thanks a lot!
For some reason Mandarin thinks a degree qualifier is needed even when you just normally use adjectives. So, for the meaning to be same, Mandarin usually can't say structures like English
You are beautiful.
Which does not have a word to qualify the adjective's degree. [1]
Mandarin usually uses words / constructions like 很, 挺(...的), 满/蛮...的 to express when there is not really any remarkable degree qualification.
As for 好, it is used to mark subjectivity: that the quality is a subjective feeling or evaluation, which varies from being just a subjective marker to meaning "very", much like how the word 很 is in Mandarin.
The counterpart to subjective would be objective: that you are merely stating a fact. English makes this kind of distinction with word pairs like "very" and "so": "You are so beautiful" means roughly the same as "You are very beautiful", except that the speaker is signaling a subjective opinion.
You could say your sentence with the objective counterpart: 你很美 would be stating something like "you are beautiful as a matter of fact". Sure, it could ultimately still boil down to the speaker's subjective opinions if we talk philosophy, but the meaning being conveyed is different.
[1] (What is the nuance of 很好? Explains when the degree qualifier can be omitted.
Basically, when you are stating some quality absolutely, as if attaching such a label -- which implies a comparison like the one described in the accepted answer.)
It's rare to use "noun + adj" as a whole sentence in daily life. Usually, people will add "adv" before adj to make the sentence sound more comfortable and normal. For example, in your example, people usually say:
你好漂亮
你真漂亮
"好" and "真" means "very" here, but the speaker doesn't intentionally want to express this meaning. These words are used here just because this is a common structure "noun + adv + adj" to say in daily life.
Another example:
今天天气真好 What a good weather today Without 真, it becomes 今天天气好, which sounds strange because of its core structure "noun + adj" as a whole sentence.
The direct translation of "You're beautiful", of course, is 你漂亮.
However, 你漂亮 sounds uncomfortable in the modern Chinese dialogue but more like ancient Chinese.
For example, 汝美, is how ancient Chinese might say "You're beautiful", where 汝 means "you" and 美 means "beautiful". And 汝美 has the same structure as 你漂亮.
To make it sounds more like modern Chinese and differentiate from ancient Chinese, we add 好 to it. And in this case, 好 means "very" or "so". It does not affect the meaning of the sentence but makes the compliment sound more sincere.
