断句

斷句

duànjù

verb #35,677

Meanings

1 to punctuate (unpunctuated classical text)
2 to mark sentence breaks
3 to pause at the right places when reading aloud

Characters

to break, cut off

Examples

古文没有标点，要自己断句。

Gǔwén méiyǒu biāodiǎn, yào zìjǐ duànjù.

Classical Chinese has no punctuation, so you have to mark the sentence breaks yourself.

断句不同，意思就完全不一样了。

Duànjù bùtóng, yìsi jiù wánquán bù yīyàng le.

Pause in different places and the meaning changes entirely.

Tips

history

Before modern punctuation arrived in the early 20th century, Chinese texts ran without any breaks; learning to 断句 — figure out where a clause ends — was a core scholar's skill. The famous example is 下雨天留客天留我不留, which yields opposite meanings depending on where you cut.

Stroke Order

断 duàn

句 jù