Not only...but also...

Vacation is over and the weather is starting to warm up a little.  Sam's sister Elizabeth went home and we have got back into our usual routines.  That means back to teaching English.  Teaching kids can be very entertaining.  I also end up learning some Chinese too. (Don't tell their parents.)  Sometimes it just so happens they we are learning the same words.  Last week one of my students vocabulary words was "crowd" and this week its a vocabulary word in my Chinese class.  Quite convenient, huh? 

When Sam and I first started attending Chinese classes here in China (Two years ago!) we focused more on building our vocabulary rather than learning grammar.  While its good to know the meanings of words, if you don't know the grammar you will still find it hard to communicate.  Sometimes I know the meaning of every word someone is saying to me but I don't understand the meaning of their sentence and vice versa.  Because I want people to understand my meaning when I speak, I find learning sentence structure very useful these days.  One of the more useful sentence structures is "Not only...but also.." (不光……还 有...)

While one of my English students, Gita, was reading the book "Frog and Toad are Friends" we came across this sentence structure.  Toad said "Not only do my feet hurt, but I have lost one of the buttons on my jacket."  I thought this would be a good opportunity to teach this sentence structure so I pointed out that Toad used this sentence to talk about two bad things that happened to him.  I said she could use this sentence with adjectives such as "Not only am I hungry but I'm also tired."  Then I told her to try making a sentence.  She looked at me and said "How do you say 馋( chán) in English?"  After I told her that word means greedy for food or gluttonous she said "Not only is my father greedy for food but he is also fat."  I had to stifle a laugh.  Instead of changing her sentence I asked her to try to think of a sentence that said something nice about someone.  Her next sentence was "Not only is she beautiful but also clever."  I thought that one was okay.

Now try it in Chinese.

bù­guāng。。。 hái (不光。。。还)= not only...also

tā bù­guāng piào­liang hái­yǒu néng­lì。 (她不光漂亮还有能力)= She is not only beautiful but also capable.

Chán ( 馋)=greedy (for food) or gluttonous