Mandarin Chinese Weblog

I’ve been watching Flying Foxy of Snow Mountain/雪山飞狐 on TV and like it very much. The hero, 胡飞, doesn’t understand women very much and mutters this line to himself: 这女孩子怎么一个比一个麻烦呀, which essentially is a declarative statement to the effect of “why are girls so bothersome” or “why are girls so much trouble?” or “girls are so much trouble.”

Let’s break it down to understand how this pattern works.

1. Context. The hero is a real man. He knows how to fight, but he doesn’t understand women. So they always give him a big burden. So, he speaks this line. The main elements of the sentence are 女孩子 (girl/girls) 一个比一个 (roughly “one vs. another”) and 麻烦 (troublesome).

这女孩子: If you’ve studied Chinese for a while, you might wonder why this isn’t 这个女孩子, or even just 女孩子. Well, 这女孩子usually refers to all girls, where as 这个女孩子 refers to just one girl. Let’s look at another example:

这杂志(Magazine) 很好. (Time) Magazine is a good magazine. Every issue is pretty good. This entire publication is good.

But if we say 这本杂志很好 We could either be talking about this magazine (this issue) or Time magazine in general.

Why use 这 at all? Why not just say 杂志很好? Well, remember that this statement is a interjection. The 这 here is used to express worry, disgust, unhappiness.  Functions like a (hey, well, man!, gee, etc)

So 这女孩子 is leaning towards “girls” in general (the 一个比一个 part makes this 100% clear).

怎么: why, but in a rhetorical way.
一个比一个: one compared to one, one compared to another

麻烦: trouble/troublesome

呀: adds strength to what’s just been said.

And here are some short dialogs to look at how this is used (谢谢在广东的Chris!):

Dialog 1
A:你的女朋友没和你一起吃饭吗？
B：我和她吵架了。
A：别担心，很快就好了。
B；她很小气的，唉，这女孩子怎么一个比一个麻烦啊

Dialog 2
A：Lili 准备好了吗？我们要走了。
B：还没呢，她还在化妆啊。
A：天啊，她化妆可是要两个小时啊。那LUCY好了吗？
B：她也没好呢，她在洗头发啊。
A：我的天啊！！！！！这女孩子怎么一个比一个麻烦啊！！！