"你有哥哥吗？"
Translation:Do you have an older brother?
24 Comments
Chinese are really specific with the family, have words for each individual in the family, 哥哥older brother, 弟弟younger brother, 姐姐older sister, 妹妹younger sister.
Chinese always says what kind of relative. Ge ge means older brother Didi means younger brother Mei mei is younger sister Jie jie means older sister Omniglot has a chart https://www.omniglot.com/language/kinship/chinese.htm
Older brother and younger brother are written differently. 哥哥 is older brother while 弟弟 is younger brother.
哥 is older brother. Didn't learn the character for the younger one yet ;-)
Oh. The characters for 'brother' are different from the other way to write 'brother' in chinese. This one is 'older brother'
There is no need for the character for 'older'
Actually "elder brother" is fine and should be accepted - it's more common in some English speaking countries than others. I say that as a native speaker who has three elder brothers :)
Hi, the above sentence means "do you have an older brother". When I gave this answer, it showed me wrong and suggested "Do you have older brothers?" which I think is wrong. Thank you.
i answered "do you have older brother" and i get an error saying it is "brothers", why? how do i know when it is singular and when it is plural? there is no xie in the sentence.
The singular is correct (see the answer at the top of the page). Your answer was wrong because the singular has to be "do you have AN older brother?". You cannot leave out the indefinite article for the singular, but you can for the plural "do you have older brothers?" If your answer is wrong Duo tries to give a correct version that is close to your answer, so it came up with "do you have older brothers?" I cannot help with the Chinese, but I assume that if Duo suggested the plural form then they are both correct.
for future reference, most people will say ni you mei you ge ge? (this is a little weird)
I would change the Chinese sentence to "你有个哥哥吗？" As it is originally, the sentence could be translated to "Do you have older brothers?" in English. Since the plural of 哥哥 is still 哥哥, the 个 would mean "a" here.
