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- "The restaurant is not there."
"The restaurant is not there."
Translation:饭馆不在那儿。
29 Comments
The character and the tone is different. where=哪儿nǎr or 哪里nǎli, while 'there'=那儿nàr or 那里nàli
1682
No. Nar with fourth tone (falling tone) means there. With third tone (falling-rising tone) means where.
Possibly the distinction between 哪 (Nǎ) and 那 (Nà)?
I'm still early in study myself though; would appreciate confirmation/correction.
- 2251
No. The tones are different. Năr (falling-rising tone) = where; nàr (falling tone) = there.
I'm so confused. No consistent word order. Extra, unidentified, words required. This language is frustrating.
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.
It isn't the language's fault. Duolingo is a pretty bad way to learn a language they don't sit you down to learn grammar or what words mean. I recommend memrise or other apps alongside this.
That's more like "The restaurant does not have here", I think.
Which doesn't make a lot of sense.
| Chinese | English | Pinyin |
|---|---|---|
| 饭馆 | restaurant | Fànguǎn |
| 不在 | (is) not located | bùzài |
| 那儿 | here | nà'er |
It seems that a 哪儿 instead of a 那儿 would make this radically different, so is it true that the meaning of this sentence hangs very delicately on the pronunciation of a single tone at the end? That would be difficult :(
Welcome to a tonal language.
Also, it would take a rather contrived or unusual circumstance for someone to use this sentence with "where" instead of "there". That would be "Where isn't the restaurant?"
This question is broken and does not accept the correct answer if "饭馆不在那儿" it is typed
我的中文老师 told me that in Northern China, it is pronounced as "r." For example, "那儿" is "nàr." But in Southern China and Taiwan, it is silent. Then "那儿“ would become "nà."
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:
-
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".
-
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.
-
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
