要不是
yào​bu​shì HSK7

if it were not for

要不是 yào​bu​shì
if it were not for conjunction
Used at the start of a sentence or clause to introduce a hypothetical situation that did not happen, meaning "if it were not for" or "but for"

要不是你，我不可能会站在这里。

yào​bu​shì nǐ, wǒ bù kě​néng huì zhàn zài zhè​lǐ.

I wouldn't be standing here if it wasn't for you.

either... or...
Used in coordinated constructions with 就是 jiù​shì to indicate that if it is not one thing, then it must be the other; if it isn't A, it's B

Frequency
Movie subtitles
1.07 per million appears in 1% of films
Written text
9.61 per million

Details
HSK 3.0
Level 7

Cross-References

Same as

Sources
Frequency data
SUBTLEX-CHBCC Corpus (BLCU)