Degree complement

This article is a stub. Editors can help the Chinese Grammar Wiki by expanding it.

Degree complements, also known as "complements of degree" in English, are 程度补语 (literally, "degree complement") in Chinese. While most complements follow verbs, degree complements very often follow adjectives. They intensify or in some other way modify the degree of expression of the adjective (or verb).

Structure of degree complements

Degree complements can modify both verbs and adjectives, but remember, they always come after the word they modify. The chart below illustrates the structural pattern you should expect to see with degree complements. Note that the structural particle 得 is used in many cases, but not in every case.

Word Preceding Complement	Particle	Degree Complement	Example
Verb	得	很好	说得很好
	得	不好	说得不好
	得	不好	说得不好
	得	不好	说得不好
Adjective	得	很	好得很
	得	不得了	坏得不得了
		极了	好极了
		死了	累死了

When to use degree complements

Until now, you may have probably been getting by just fine modifying your verbs with adverbs. You can use 非常 to say "very" and all that. Great. But once you learn to use degree complements, a whole new layer of expressiveness is infused into your language. You will be able to express degree of verbs and adjectives with much more precision and color. But how do you know when to use the degree complement? Here are the main reasons to use it:

To express how a verb happened or assess its quality
To express to extent degree an adjective is true

For the first case, the most typical examples would be describing how well an action is done, or in asking how well an action is done:

他做 得很好 。 The complement tells us that "he did it well."
他做 得很差 。 The complement tells us that "he did it poorly."
他做 得怎么样 ？ The complement is used to ask "how he did it."

For the second case, instead of using the good old standby adverbs 很 and 非常,

他做 得很好 。 The complement tells us that "he did it well."
他做 得很差 。 The complement tells us that "he did it poorly."
他做 得怎么样 ？ The complement is used to ask "how he did it."

We will illustrate both cases here, starting with simple examples, and slowly building in complexity.

List of the most common degree complements