(dāng) - when, at the time of, to serve as in Mandarin
dāngTraditional: 當
HSK 3
#132 of 5,000 Core 1000
Translation
when, at the time of, to serve as
Word origin
当 (traditional 當) is a phono-semantic compound: 田 (field) is the meaning element and 尚 (shàng) the phonetic. From a sense of matching or facing it came to mean 'to serve as, at the time of, when'.
- Origin
- phono-semantic compound
- Root
- 田 (tián, field) + 尚 (shàng, phonetic)
Stroke order
当
Examples
。
When I was young.
。
Being a teacher is hard.
。
At the time I did not know.
。
He wants to become a doctor.
，。
When I got home, it was dark.
当 (dāng) means when, at the time of, to serve as. It is used as a preposition in everyday Mandarin speech.
Appears in 3 words
Multi-character compounds in the corpus that contain 当.
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