When you are talking with the overseas students who are studying in Mandarin language courses in China, you may hear they say the sentence like这件衣服值得500块, which is as a matter of fact incorrect. The overseas students make such mistake because they didn’t know clearly the differences between 值and值得in meanings. At the same time, they also do not understand the difference between nominal-object verbs and predicate-object verbs, hence making mistakes of such type.

In Chinese language, most verbs can take the objects of nominal words which include noun, pronoun and numeral words. Therefore, we call them the nominal-object verbs such as 吃、买and卖. However, some verbs can only take the objects of predicate type such as verb and adjective, which is called the predicate-object verbs such as 加以、进行、开始and认为. Most transitive verbs in Chinese are nominal-object verbs but the number of predicate-object verbs is limited like 给予、给以、继续、结束、决定and希望and so on.

For those verbs which can take only objects of predicate type, the teachers should pay special attention to them when they teach Mandarin language. They can strengthen the features of them by formatting them like “加以/进行/开始 + verbs” with the examples of 加以讨论、进行研究and开始学习. Of course, there are also a large number of verbs in Chinese can take both the objects of predicate type and nominal type like 喜欢、讨厌、通知、记得、同意, etc.

Let’s move our attention to the words 嫌and讨厌, both of which are transitive verbs but have different objects. The verbs in Chinese like 喜欢and讨厌can take both the objects of predicate pattern and nominal style. However, 嫌can take only the predicate object and the reason of 嫌should appear after it. For example, in the sentence我嫌他矮, 他is the object of 嫌 and 他矮 is the reason of 嫌他. Therefore, it is important for teachers to tell the feature of the verbs when meeting the predicate-object verbs, which is to take verb or adjective as object.