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plThe adjectives 好 hǎo ‘easy; good’ and 难/難 nán ‘difficult’ can be combined with verbs to describe whether an action is easy or difficult to do.
These expressions are common in daily speech to describe and evaluate experiences.
Structure
Basic form
The adjectives hǎo 好 ‘easy; good’ and nán 难/難 ‘difficult’ are placed in front of a verb. The verb is mostly a monosyllabic and action-oriented verb.
The phrases formed by hǎo 好 or nán 难/難 and the following verb act like an adjective and can serve as a predicate in a sentence.
Negation
A negative is formed by placing the negation adverb bù 不 before the expression.
Questions
There are two ways to form a yes-no question.
One way is to add the question particle ma 吗/嗎 at the end of the sentence.
Another way to form a yes-no question is by combining the affirmative and negative forms of the verb. Note that the first occurrence of the verb is often omitted.
With adverbs
Adverbs like hěn 很 ‘very’, tài 太 ‘very’, too, or zhēn 真 ‘very, really’ can be placed before hǎo 好 ‘easy; good’ or nán 难 ‘difficult’ to intensify the expression.
With prepositional phrase
Prepositional phrases usually come at the beginning of the sentence for emphasis.
Functions
1. Hǎo 好 ‘easy; good’ and nán 难 /難 ‘difficult’ Expressing the Ease or Difficulty of Doing Something
With action verbs like xué 学/學 ‘learn, study’, xiě 写/寫 ‘write’, zuò 做 ‘make’, shuō 说/說 ‘speak’, etc., hǎo 好 and nán 难/難 express a general evaluation of how easy or hard the action is to perform.
These compounds function as a general judgment about an action’s degree of difficulty or ease, rather than describing the actual occurrence of the action.
The action verbs retain their literal meanings, as in the compounds hǎodǒng 好懂 ‘easy to understand’ or nánxué 难/難学 ‘hard to learn’.
These compounds are very common in daily speech.
2. Hǎo 好 and nán 难/難 ‘Expressing Quality of Experience
When used with sensory-related verbs like kàn 看 ‘look’, tīng 听/聽 ‘listen’ or chī 吃 ‘eat’, the adjectives hǎo 好 and nán 难/難 together with the verbs describe the quality of things and convey the meaning of something being pleasant or unpleasant to the senses.
These compounds create fixed expressions, almost like single words, like 好吃 hǎochī ‘delicious, tasty’ or 难/難看 nánkàn ‘ugly’.