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
Some Chinese verbs are separable (also called verb-object compounds), that is:
他今天上三個鐘頭的課 (He/she had three hours of class today)
Where 上課 is a separable verb.
As there is no rules on which verbs are separable and not, I'm looking for an online resource where I can look that up. For example, does CC-CEDICT contain info about which verbs is separable and not?
The Pleco app contains this information. It was actually confusing me for a while, but the //'s in the pinyin indicate verb separability. Pleco includes some free dictionaries, but it also allows you to download others for a price. I'm not sure if the verb-separation indications are tied to any particular dictionary.
Don't do this.
When you learn mandarin, you should learn all possible meaning of verb noun, then counter check with your mother tongue language, and think whether it is logical even you speak with you mother tongue language.
In fact, in mandarin, you will have less confusion if you try to understand individual glyph. Once you get use to each glyph meaning, then you can start learn combination verb/noun/proverb.
Take 上课 as example, from young, native speaker learn the verb 上. Then there will be no surprise when one saw the variance , i.e. when 上 mean "go to do something", then it is obvious the noun like 课 make it an an action. So
Unlike English, German, etc you don't need to deal with abnormal verb changes. thus learning the root glyph let you understanding most written article without knowing tons of mandarin nouns.
