I can't live that kind of life.
CHINESE DICTIONARY ENTRY
不能
cannot
IN A VIDEO不能
See this word with its surrounding sentence, pinyin, translation, and timestamp.
DEFINITIONS & USAGE
Meaning and common use
01
cannot
02
must not
03
should not
REAL CORPUS EXAMPLES
How 不能 actually appears in real sentences.
These sentences are copied from the Tatoeba corpus, so they are real usage rather than generated text. 不能 appears in 704 of the 89,190 sentences we searched.
I'm as tired as tired can be.
Could you pass me the salt, please?
COMMON COLLOCATIONS
Words that keep company with 不能.
Counted from the same corpus: the word that most often comes directly before, and directly after, 不能.
Directly before
- 我不能139
- 你不能81
- 能不能50
- 我们不能37
- 他不能23
Directly after
- 不能再33
- 不能来25
- 不能让19
- 不能做18
- 不能在16
ABOUT THIS ENTRY
Where this entry comes from
The HSK level, part of speech, and pronunciation come from the HSK 3.1 vocabulary syllabus. The English definitions come from CC-CEDICT. Corpus sentences, collocations, and the frequency figure come from the Tatoeba Chinese sentence export and are counted rather than written, so nothing on this page is invented. Usage notes and the hand-written examples that appear higher up exist only for a handful of entries.
Definitions from CC-CEDICT, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Vocabulary levels and parts of speech from the HSK 3.1 syllabus. This compiled dictionary is shared under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
COMMON QUESTIONS
About 不能
What does 不能 mean in Chinese?
不能 (bùnéng) means cannot.
How do you pronounce 不能?
不能 is pronounced bùnéng.
Is 不能 an HSK word?
不能 is on the list of the HSK 3.1 vocabulary syllabus.
SEE IT IN CONTEXT
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