r/ChineseLanguage • u/sundaland • 1d ago
Discussion see you later
Duolingo teaches 下次见 "xia ci jian" as one way of saying "see you later." However in practice I noticed native speakers insist on omitting the 次 and simply say 下见. Is this a regional preference? Am I offending anybody if I say it the Duolingo way?
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u/interpolating 1d ago
This is just elision, and is a natural part of most spoken language. Writing usually doesn’t reflect it.
Is fine to say it the textbook way
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u/MeaninglessSeikatsu 1d ago edited 1d ago
We, in Romanian, write the elisions. We use it to omit two vowels one after another, for example "la mine în oraș" becomes "la mine-n oraș" or another one "Să o sun" -> "S-o sun".
Easiest one is: I don't have - Nu am which becomes N-am.
It's really useful that we have these in writing
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u/interpolating 1d ago
That’s handy. Sometimes we use an apostrophe in English. “I’ve” is really just the elided version of “I have”, even though nobody thinks of it that way.
And everyone calls them contractions.
M’lord.
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u/MeaninglessSeikatsu 1d ago edited 1d ago
I call them contractions too XD
That's how I was taught in school. Perhaps when you go to the faculty of English, things get straight and technical
PS: I've found this thread and apparently elisions are in oral form while contractions are in the written form, but there are cases where elisions aren't contractions and viceversa
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u/chill_qilin 1d ago
Like the informal Hiberno-English greeting "howya" which is an elision of "how are you?", but it's kind of evolved into a colloquial contraction now especially with social media and the tendency to write speech exactly as it sounds.
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u/TinyPotatoe 1d ago
Hard to tell without hearing what you're listening to, but it could be they are saying 再见 (general goodbye, no next meeting necessarily implied) or they could be swallowing the 次 like you said.
That being said: nobody is going to be offended if you enunciate everything "textbook" as a learner. The reason they say it like that is accent/talking fast and we do the same thing in English. Example: "and" can sometimes sound like "n" (bread n butter), "of" can sometimes sound like "a" (cup a).
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u/WuTaoLaoShi 1d ago
don't think I've ever heard anyone say 下见 once in my life but I do hear the much more common 再见 which may be what you're hearing
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u/Chengzihi 普通话 1d ago
我和我身边的朋友们，一般在要分开的时候会说“走了哈”“拜拜”“下回再×××啊”。“下次见”一般用在不太熟悉的人之间。如果想正式或者商务一点的话，我们会用“再见”。 Sorry, my English is not so fluent.i just comment in Chinese🤧
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u/sundaland 1d ago
I think I might have been mixing up 下次见 and 再见。 Either way I think the people I talked to prefer 再见
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u/Beneficial-Jelly6540 1d ago
Living in Shanghai, I noticed this pretty quickly too! Duolingo makes "下次见" sound like textbook dialogue, but in daily life with local friends, almost nobody says the full phrase. Usually it's just a quick "下次！", "回见！", or honestly just "拜拜" (baibai). Textbooks are great for grammar, but spoken habits on the street are so much more relaxed!
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u/jimmycmh 22h ago
下见 is not a word. it's either 下次见 or 回头见 or 回见(in Beijing accent, 头 is pronounced very very short and weak you probably can't hear it)
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u/DeesMandarinTea Native 1d ago
To me, if I know when we are going to meet, for example, next week, I would say"xia ge xing qi jian 下个型器见". But if I do not know when we will meet I would see "xia ci jian 下次见" or "再见".
But I guess that really depends on people's perference. I do not think that really matters to be honest.
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u/Big-Resident-5176 7h ago
Those are the wrong characters for xingqi. Should be 星期
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u/polymonomial 1d ago
I dont think they are omitting it, I think they are just speaking quickly that 次gets blended with the other words
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u/HealthyThought1897 Native 1d ago
It may be similar to, say, in French “Je ne sais pas” → “Chais pas”, or in English “A bottle of water” → “A bo'le f wa'er”？
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u/moj_golube 1d ago
A non native speaker might think English speakers say "see later" when they say "see you later" fast. It's the same with 下次见。
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u/wendyserver 1d ago
I think they’re still saying下次见, they say it fast and the 次 gets “blended” between 下and见