Again, this is an astonishingly common one - I feel sure it must be in a textbook somewhere; or perhaps in some kind of reference book such as a glossary comparing Chinese and English proverbs. It is, in fact, rather more than merely common; it is ubiquitous.
'Pain' is - usually - uncountable. Therefore, the phrase in English is:
No pain, no gain.
This really shouldn't be that hard to remember. Particularly if, with your irrepressible love of clichés, you are going to use it every day of your life.
12 comments:
'Pain' is most certainly countable in set phrases -- "took pains to"/"at pains to," "growing pains," "aches and pains," etc. Not that it justifies "no pains, no gains," but at least it's not completely off the wall.
I'm with Weeble - the issue is just failing to learn the phrase. Pain is something which does have a plural in English, even if the situations in which it is typically used are limited.
Incidentally, I see that the governor of the Chinese central bank has published a speech attacking the reliance of the global economy on the dollar - and published an official English translation. Haven't seen all of it, but the BBC website quotes it as saying that some IMF notional monetary unit nobody has ever heard of 'serves as the light in the tunnel for the reform of the international monetary system'.
Sounds like there is a general problem with getting the exact wording and nuance of phrases to me...
Read carefully, people. That's why I added the "usually". The medical ("Have you had any more pains in your legs?") and colloquial ("Oooh, me aches and pains!") uses are rarer, the exception rather than the rule.
And every bloody Chinese person I've ever met or worked with has said this sooner rather than later. It is one of the most common set phrases they've picked up from the crappy English education here.
We can't even begin to try and tell people that the light in the tunnel is usually an oncoming train.
Or rather, that the lights in the tunnels are usually oncoming trains.
I feel a My Fair Lady moment coming on...
We all missed a great opportunity during last year's Olympics to exact retribution with "one worlds, one dreams".
you see Froog, this is why I think English grammar so silly.
The fact that wanna-be linguists like you and Weeble can have a mini-debate on whether or not there should be a "s" after pain shows English grammar is really a “pain in the arse”.
Anon, please give yourself a screen name, or face being 'harmonised'.
The Weeble and I were not arguing over whether 'pain' should or should not have an 's' in this phrase; we were pondering how this error could have arisen in Chinese English usage.
English grammar is not 'silly'; it is sophisticated. It is capable of far more elegance and precision than just about any other language in the world.
The fact that Chinese can't even differentiate between the singular and plural (without adding numbers) makes it one of the more backward children in the great world family of languages.
"pondering how this error could have arisen in Chinese English usage..."
I think you have been away from home for too long. For someone who is pretty hopeless with English gramma, I often notice at least one grammar mistake in any conversion that last more than 10 minutes with native speakers.
“It is capable of far more elegance and precision than just about any other language in the world.”
Ok .. we all know you are an anglophile but this claim is just a bit rich.
You are equating unnecessary complexity to sophistication. There are more exceptions than rules. It seems English gramma is more honoured in the breach than the observance.
If you don't get the elegance and precision, you don't know the language well enough.
If you think the claim is exaggerated, you don't get the modest understatement of "one of the...."
Everybody makes grammar (or other) mistakes in any language all the time.
The issue here is why certain errors in English - errors which ought to be fairly obvious and easily correctable for anyone who actually reads a large amount of decent quality native-speaker English - are almost universal amongst Chinese English speakers. Part of it is an unusually severe first language interference, but a lot of it is down to really bad teaching materials entrenching these mistakes in the collective consciousness (allied with the unshakable belief that they are correct).
"Everybody makes grammar (or other) mistakes in any language all the time."
True, but I found native English speakers more prone to making grammar mistakes because they can get their meaning across more concisely by bypassing some of the inane rules.
Oh, yeah, regarding singular and plurals, if you want precision, there are numbers and phrases such as “a lot”, “many”, “a few” etc – the extract “s” at the end is redundant and unnecessary.
You got it right when it comes to sheep, “two sheep” is definitely more elegant than “two sheeps”.
If nothing else, you would at least save on ink, paper or the extract bit of wasted energy in pronouncing the good old “s”.
Stu, if you've ever read any kind of technical or academic writing - history, legal opinions, philosophical treatises - in English (or in any other language that differentiates between the singular and plural forms of nouns), you ought to appreciate just how useful this distinction is.
It is one of the more unfortunate shortcomings of English than when people speak of "the sheep", we don't know if they mean one or many.
Omissions and simplifications of grammar structures in the spoken version of a language are not necessarily to be regarded as 'mistakes'. Such ellipses are often held to be perfectly allowable in speech, without implying that the fuller version preferred in written language is unnecessary or redundant.
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