Is 極了 used in Taiwan?

Language Learning Chinese
1

My old and possibly outdated textbook says that the word ending 極了, meaning “extremely”, is rarely used in Taiwan. Is that true, or do you hear it being used?

2

Agree with your book. Here it’s all 超級 or 非常非常

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3

You hear it from older mainlanders, but that’s about it.

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4

It isn’t used in Taiwan. I don’t know if that term may be used elsewhere. In Taiwan 超 is used to express extremes. For example extremely torrential rain (not grammatically correct but bear with me) is called 超大豪雨.

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5

They use it on novels

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6

So the example in the book was 好極了 to mean “extremely good” – specifically, in response to some positive news like “there’s a train departing tomorrow that exactly fits your schedule”, to which the traveler says “好極了”.

Can 超級 or 非常非常 be used the same way? Something like this?

超級好

非常好

7

Probably 超好的 ?

Also, 棒

太棒了吧!

非常棒

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8

I think you can only hear -極了 following 好 or 妙 in Taiwan, and usually only for people above 40.

If 超級好 without anything before or after is used, it sounds super Chinese. 非常好 is usually used as a comment from someone with a higher status, like an elder or a boss.

Younger people would probably use this, but maybe people younger than 20 years old would consider it for older people only. 棒 came from Japanese ichiban (一番), and for whatever reason, Taiwanese people just took the ban part and thought it meant best.

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9

So mainlanders don’t say 棒?

I’d say if you are studying Chinese don’t learn from this age group. They keep shortening things. They don’t even say 便宜 anymore, they just say 很便!

10

If they do, they probably borrowed it between the late 90s and early 2000s when Taiwanese media was all the rage there.

They are also heavy tiktok users, so a lot of vocabs that used to just be a thing in China are being introduced into Taiwan through this generation.

11

I only see 極了 used in credit card names and titles. or any formal setting.

I don’t think I never heard it in normal contexts.

12

So you are saying kids shorteing things to ‘pian’ instead of ‘pian yi’ and ‘hua’ instead of ‘hua suan’ is due to tik tok?

13

I think that is a local Taipei phenomenon, but I am not 100% sure.

14

I’d say its from Taiwan as they also shortened ‘zhen de jia de’ to ‘zhen jia’.

15

For a 4 character compound noun A1A2+B1B2 in Mandarin, the frequency of abbreviated form is:

A1B1 (台灣銀行 台銀) > A2B1 (台北車站 北車) > A1B2 (國民政府 國府) > A2B2 (中央銀行 央行)

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16

What?