相当 xiāngdāng ・ 可 kě — “Quite” & the Emphatic 可
相当 xiāngdāng is a formal, measured “quite/fairly.” 可 kě here is a different animal — a colloquial, emphatic marker that always leans on a sentence-final particle.
This 可 kě is not the “can/may” auxiliary verb you already know — here it’s a degree adverb, and it’s mostly a Mainland colloquial habit; Taiwan speakers rarely use it this way.
1 相当 xiāngdāng — “Quite / Fairly”
A formal, objective degree adverb — Subject + 相当 xiāngdāng + Adjective/Verb.
Taiwan is renowned for its safety. It’s common to see people leave phones and wallets unattended on café tables while stepping away — though it’s still smart to keep an eye on your things. Women can generally walk alone safely after 11pm thanks to 24-hour convenience stores and widespread CCTV, and the country has relatively few homeless people, drug users, or public drunkenness. Even the street dogs tend to be friendly.
不切实际 bú qiè shíjì is a fixed four-character phrase meaning “unrealistic / impractical” — literally “doesn’t cut into reality.” It’s a common, ready-made way to criticize a plan, expectation, or idea as out of touch with what’s actually achievable.
2 可 kě — Emphatic “Really” (Colloquial)
Pattern: 可 kě + Adjective/Verb + 了 le/呢 ne — the particle at the end isn’t optional, it’s what makes the emphasis land.
This 可 kě is exclamatory, so it can’t take negation or form a direct yes/no question — there’s no 不可漂亮 bù kě piàoliang or 可漂亮嗎 kě piàoliang ma. The question example above, 可贵了吧 kě guì le ba, still works because it’s still an exclamation — it’s just seeking the listener’s agreement with the tag 吧 ba, not turning 可 kě itself into a question.
| Word | Feel | Structure |
|---|---|---|
| 相当 xiāngdāng | Formal, measured — “quite/fairly” | S + 相當 + Adj/V |
| 可 kě | Colloquial, emphatic — mostly Mainland usage | 可 + Adj/V + 了/呢 |
3 Common Mistake
This emphatic 可 kě always needs a sentence-final particle like 了 le or 呢 ne to land — dropping it leaves the sentence sounding unfinished.
You might come across 可不漂亮 kě bù piàoliang somewhere and wonder if that’s the negated form. It isn’t wrong Chinese — but it’s also not a negation of this exclamatory 可 kě. “Negating an exclamation” isn’t really a thing in Chinese grammar. What you’re seeing there is a completely different 可 kě — an emphatic “indeed / really” marker used to affirm or push back on something, unrelated to the 可 + Adj + 了 le pattern covered here. You can read more about that one in this article. To simply say the opposite of this exclamatory 可, just drop 可 kě and negate normally, like 一点都不漂亮 yìdiǎn dōu bù piàoliang.
4 Practice
Translate each sentence into Chinese, then tap the card to check your answer.
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