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So in the convenience store, there were bottles of iced coffee with the slogan:

同 品 項 第 2 仵 6折

I was told that this meant: "Buy the first item, get the second item at 60% of base price."

I was able to find the individual characters in various dictionaries:

同 tong2 be the same

品 pin3 merchandise

項 xiang4 item? expenditure?

第 [dì] number

2

件 [Thanks to wilson and user238264 for the correction]

6

折 [zhé] discount

The hard parts are the last two Mandarin characters. I couldn't find a translation for 件 and while "lose money" roughly fits "discount" for 折 [zhé], I couldn't see any grammar.

Possibly there isn't any grammar to be found. Possibly the convenience store is wildly abbreviating its Mandarin because most customers can infer huge amounts of meaning from context.

Any grammar and usage insights are welcome. Thanks.

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    It should be 件 instead of 仵. 件 means "piece". "第2件" means "the second piece".
    – wilson
    Nov 15, 2013 at 3:02
  • 第1, 第2, 第3, 第4, 第5...,第n = 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th...,nth. You can treat 項 as a row in the list. We list the merchandise in a list.
    – Casper
    Nov 15, 2013 at 11:41

3 Answers 3

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I am pretty sure that you have the second to last character wrong. It makes much more sense as 件 (item). Also, 折 should be read as zhé in this context. The character has a large number of meanings, but in this context it means discount (and the single digit numbers preceding it count by 10%; this is a common idiomatic construction for expressing discounts). Finally, 第 signifies that the following number is to be read as an ordinal (1st, 2nd, 3rd, ...)

So, a very literal translation of 同品项第２件６折 would be: same product, second item, discounted to 60%

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    Just some extra info to add to this answer, you will quite commonly see signs with just ６折 above items in shops to indicate the 40% discount on a particular item. 打6折 is used to describe an item as 40% off.
    – going
    Nov 14, 2013 at 23:59
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In English we say:

Buy one, get the second for 40% off!

Chinese is the other way round. They say:

Buy one and get the other for 60% of the original price!

6折 means 60% of the original price

So,

  • 9折 means 10% off
  • 85折 means 15% off
  • 8折 means 20% off
  • ...
  • 1折 means 90% off
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I think the sentence should be: t同品项第2件6折 Your translation for “ 同、品、项” is right，“第2” means “ the second”， and I am sure the character after “2” is “件（jian2）”， not仵，“件” is a measure word, so “ 第2件” means “ the second（item）”， and “折” should be pronounced as [zhé], which means “discount”， so “ 6折” means “ 40% off”or “60% of base price”.

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