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- "The restaurant is not there."
"The restaurant is not there."
Translation:饭馆不在那儿。
29 Comments
1682
No. Nar with fourth tone (falling tone) means there. With third tone (falling-rising tone) means where.
2251
No. The tones are different. Năr (falling-rising tone) = where; nàr (falling tone) = there.
This course isn't exactly making it easy either, so much information feels missing, no translations are available for character blocks (on mobile) forcing a lot of guesswork if you want to advance (also unnecessarily hard to learn the individual characters or the way they combine into set phrases or compounds), word order isn't really taught even though it certainly seems important, many dropdown hint menus are largely irrelevant or misleading, a LOT of time is spent on associating sounds and characters without a translation available (making them harder to memorize) or just sounds+pinyin with no (Chinese) characters or translations, etc. I was so excited to see China appear in the language menu, but this has felt really lackluster in execution.
饭馆 is "restaurant", but the problem is that Mandarin has many words that can be translated as restaurant. Despite I've been studying Chinese for years, I am still not sure which word should be used when talking about a restaurant. So I have done a quick search on Baidu (Chinese Google) and found the following explanations:
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饭馆 (fanguan) refers to rather small restaurants, usually with a quite limited choice of dishes, that do not pay a particular attention on the atmosphere of the place, but focus on "filling their customers' stomachs".
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餐馆/餐厅 (canguan/canting) refer to bigger restaurants that pay attention to the decoration and atmosphere of the place, as well as to the flavour of their dishes.
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饭店 (fandian) refers to big, several-star restaurants that provide extra services beside a delicate cuisine in a nice environment, like hotel rooms, a billard, a swimming pool...
The translations provided by Pleco (a good dictionary available for free as a smartphone app) seem to be quite in line with these explanations as they translate 饭馆 as "small restaurant" or "eating house", 餐厅 as "dining room/hall" or "restaurant", and 饭店 as "hotel" or "restaurant". However, I think the scope of these terms may overlap and the distinctions between them may be blurry sometimes.
Source (in Chinese): https://zhidao.baidu.com/question/121634384.html