All about 过不去

All about 过不去

你为什么老是跟我过不去?这里过不去,请绕道!我心里真过不去。”过不去” a very frequently-used word. It has the following three uses.

Uses of 过不去

1. Can not go through, impassable

The basic meaning of “过” is “pass or go through”, so “过不去” means “cannot go through/impassable”. Examples:

道路阻塞车子The road was blockedno car could pass.

这桌子太宽,从门口过不去。The table is too wide, and we can’t carry it through the doorway.

前面正在修路,过不去。 The road ahead is under repair so you can’t get through.

假如山口过不去,依你看该怎么办好呢?What do you figure on if we can’t get through the pass?

Don’t forget to check out the use of 过得去

You may also want to know 不得了

2. Be hard on somebody, be difficult with, offend

别跟自己过不去。 Don’t be too hard on yourself.

我并不是存心要跟你过不去。 I didn’t mean to be difficult with you.

我要是说个‘不’字, 老板准跟我过不去。If I say no, the boss will only make trouble for me.

我们批评你是为了帮助你, 绝不是跟你过不去。We criticized you because we wanted to help you, not in order to find fault with you.

3. Feel sorry for, have something on your conscience,

给你添了这么多麻烦,我心里真过不去。 I’m really sorry for giving you so much trouble.

费了你这么多时间,我心里真过不去。 I’m sorry to have taken up so much of your time.

不必十分过不去。Don’t take it so much to heart.

伊安因为错看了她而感到良心上过不去。Ian felt a pang of conscience at having misjudged her.

See more examples on Baidu Translation and Jukuu for for 过不去

One thought on “All about 过不去”

  1. Really interesting resource. I actually came here taking a tea break from some work I had been doing on classifying characters using a few books – Matthews, Chinese Character fast finder, McNaughton, Reading and writing Chinese, and Fun with Chinese characters, Straits Times. The latter two, as a rarity, actually pay some attention to the non-radical character components, but not in a systematic way. So I searched firstly ideographic, then pictographic, characters: “most common” “lists” and so on. Your site does appear to take a systematic approach from a number of perspectives. One criticism – and this I find to be near-universal among Sinophone pedagogues of Sinophone origin: When there is a choice of adding (only one of) either pinyin or English to clarify hanzi text, it is always wrong to use the English. Speaking as an Anglophone learner of Chinese, I can emphatically state that pinyin is several orders of magnitude more helpful than English. One other thing: word-spacing. I realise that word-spacing is not characteristic of Chinese, and so it is not seen as “authentic.” However, I suggest that authenticity is a massively over-rated and over-used concept in language pedagogy, actually causing great harm to the aims of the exercise. Especially in view of the syllabic naturre of Chinese, word-spacing – for beginners to at least intermediate level – would assist comprehension and minimise frustration – and student drop-off. A few years ago, when my Chinese was at a higher level than now (just getting back into it again), I tried reading some children’s, or other-easy, books, and found that I was able to read 70 – 80% of the characters, but eventually found it too discouraging because of the constant uncertainty of whether a given character was at the beginning, middle or end of a word. No doubt I should have persisted, and eventually would have developed a sixth sense for this. I point out that the situation is radically different for Sinophone children possessing about the same level of hanzi knowledge. They have first heard these words and phrases before learning to write them, and therefore have an instinct for what goes where. Again, I commend your effort in putting together your site. Together with a few others that I have seen lately, it encourages me to believe that Chinese language learning might be about to emerge from the dark ages.

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