Is there a difference between 教训 and 论点 ？

Question

I'm taking a history class in Chinese and my teacher brought up 四五运动的两个教训 。 Then later on he talked about 启蒙的两个论点 。 I know that roughly 教训 is translated as "lessons" and 论点 is a bit more like "thesis, or arguments" - but could someone make this distinction a bit more clear? Or are they relatively interchangeable when talking about history?

Answer 1

When we say 教训, this word is more commonly used as a verb in daily conversation. The elderly can 教训 the younger people. And the main meaning is teaching a lesson to other people which your explanation is correct.

When we use 教训 as a noun, the meaning of this word transfer into what we learned from a lesson. For instance, 我爷爷经常教训爸爸，说：”人要学会从教训中吸取经验。“ You can try to translate by yourself first.

the meaning is my grandpa always teaching my dad saying:" people need to learn from their lessons."

One more thing is when we use 教训 as a noun, most of the time, it has a negative meaning. the lesson which made you learn usually is not that good and the result tend to be failure. From the example that you learned from your class, the result of 五四运动 is not that positive, many young people died from that protest. That is when we use 教训. otherwise, if the result is good, we would use some adjective to describe how good the result is.

For 论点， this is a pretty formal word. It mainly used in your essay. It is a noun only. the meaning is when you trying to explain your opinions, or you want to argue somebody else's opinions, you can use 论点 to sum up yours, or theirs opinion, instead of repeat the whole concept and conversation. If we separate 论点 into independent word, it means the point which you can argue. So, I hope this way of translate this word can help you to understand 论点。

Answer 2

Hi, as you said, when 教训 is used as a noun, could be directly interpreted in English as Lessons, but implies that if you did something wrong or bad, you learn some lessons (教训), and 教训 could also be used as a verb, in most cases , it means that , a senior or higher ranking person teaches a younger or inexperienced person some lessons, and sometimes implies a bad temper;

论点 can only be used as noun, which means your statement, or some key bullet points of your speech or essay, for example, when you are debating, you try to list out some 论点 to persuade the people who are against your opinions.

Personally, as a Mandarin Chinese native speaker, I don't think the two phases can be easily interchangeable, you need to be careful using them, because 教训 has a negative feeling, but 论点 is a neutral word.

Hope this could be helpful!