according to skritter and dictionaries 桥梁 means bridge. According to my Chinese friend it is only part of a bridge and you cannot say this to mean a whole bridge. The example sentence was something like "the floods washed away a lot of bridges" (许多桥梁) He insists it is one bridge that was damaged but several parts of it.

What's up with this.

And now that i am here... he also says nobody uses 往往? But it is in HSK though.

This kind of thing happens a lot though, like they say nobody uses it and then you hear them using it half an hour later. Kind of opposite of the annoying: yes you can say that, or, both is correct, but actually nobody would say it that way.

According to all the dictionaries I have 桥梁 does indeed mean a single bridge in both literal or figurative senses.

However the character 梁 is also used to mean a beam (as in construction). So I suppose in the context of the sentence above it must mean many of the beams/struts that make up the bridge were washed away.

I guess even much of the new HSK must be based on written sources. 往往 isn't spoken much, but if you search for it on BBC Chinese you get 266 pages of results.

single bridge as in a bridge with only one arch? That could have been what he meant (his english is not very good). He said something like it is the thing underneath the bridge so I thought he meant the pillar, because he also gave a synonym which I forgot, but it seemed to mean the thing the bridge is resting on.

But if the meaning of the example sentence is that many of the beams or arches of one bridge were washed away than the translation is wrong. Since it says "many bridges".

I meant rather that this was the only meaning the dictionaries had. Bad phrasing. Arch bridge is a 拱桥.

Pretty sure it's referring to the beams. Pillar would be 柱.

And the example sentences on Skritter do have mistakes like this. They were taken automatically from an outside source.

This article ( http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5f0afa330100dd8u.html ) presents the top ten well-known Chinese new bridges (中国十大知名新建桥梁 ). See for yourself what does 桥梁 means.