Lesson 2.3 - At the Airport

First, regarding this sentence: Qǐng chūshì nǐde fēijīpiào。 请出示你的飞机票。 Your tickets, please. I think a more precise English translation is "Please present your airline tickets." Google translate give this for "Your tickets, please": 你的票。 Nǐ de piào. Second, regarding this sentence: qǐng gěiwǒ kào chuāngkǒu de zuòwèi。 请给我靠窗口的座位。 could I please have a seat by the window. The first part, "qǐng gěiwǒ kào" seems to translate to "please give me by" and the second part "chuāngkǒu de zuòwèi" translates to "window seat". I am curious as to why we need the "kào" since window seats are by definition seats by the window. Secondly, the English translation should probably be something like this "please give me a seat by the window". I know that <adjective><noun> is translated to <adjective> 的 <noun> in Chinese.

你好Robert! Google Translate once again. 靠 means to approach, be close to or next to and does not pertain to the first half of the sentence but rather the 窗口. So, all of 靠窗口 is actually modifying the noun 座位. Be careful where you choose to split up the sentence because it may cause confusion as it did so above. Once again the English translations are not word for word translations because we would lose much of the meaning and the nuances. Keep up the good work! - Lin Ping

Thank you for the explanation. One of the hard things about parsing Chinese sentences is that words are not clearly designated the way they are in English. You just have a sequence of characters with no spaces. When we write Pinyin, we can put the spaces in but we can just as easily put spaces between each syllable and that would be correct too. I hope at some point Rocket Chinese considers adding a lesson vocabulary section to the lessons and include any new or unfamiliar vocabulary that is introduced in that lesson. Actually, this would be useful for all of your languages.

Robert 你好! Yes, I understand how difficult it is. In ancient China it was even more difficult because we had no punctuation so you could have entire texts where there were no full stops, commas or anything like that and you just had to interpret the text as best as you could. Keep up the hard work! 加油！ - Lin Ping