"医院的电话号码是多少？"
Translation:What is the phone number of the hospital?
46 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
What is the hospital's phone number should be correct. It's a translation and a good one
"What is the phone number for the hospital" is also a perfectly correct English meaning.
Here are some handy emergency phone numbers. I sourced most of these from the internet (only a couple of them from personal experience); I hope this information is correct; please, check to make sure, or to see if you need to dial a prefix from your phone:
In mainland China (PRC):
110 for police (text 12110)
119 for ambulance or fire*
120 for ambulance
122 for road police or traffic accidents
12395 for SOS on water
*According to Wikipedia, 112 and 119 play a bilingual Chinese and English message with information about other emergency numbers.
In Hong Kong:
112 or 999 for general emergencies
992 for deaf, fax, or text
In Macau:
112 for emergencies (for international tourists)
999 for ambulance, fire, or police
In Taiwan:
110 for police
119 for ambulance or fire
I'll re-post an earlier comment of mine from another page. I'm curious to know your thoughts upon reading it.
This is what I've learned:
- 你的电话号码是多少？
- 你的电话（号码）（是）几号？ (This version is common without "是", but it also occurs with it.)
- 你的电话号码是什么？
.Native Mandarin Chinese speakers have their individual opinions about these, because China is a big place, not to mention the outlying Chinese-speaking countries and regions, and this is a colloquial sentence influenced by local dialects and by quirks of history.
1 is somewhat more northern, but common in a lot of China, and perhaps most common overall. 2 is perhaps half as common as 1, but it's more southern, and common in Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia (and perhaps other places, e.g. the southern mainland or some of it), where people will often swear they've never heard 1 (and likewise, proponents of 1 will often swear they've never heard 2). In each of these two cases, proponents of one version will say why the other isn't logical, and none of their reasons is really very convincing. It seems the usage of one or the other is really about history, habit, and experience.
3 is fairly common, but perhaps not as common as 1. It feels unnatural to some speakers (particularly to many who like 1) but not to others (those who like 2 are usually fine with it, as are some who like 1). Those who don't like it will even go so far as to say it sounds like you don't really know what a telephone number is, or even what a telephone is.
Where English has a greater influence, 3 seems like the more correct or formal structure to some speakers. That's not to say that 3 doesn't have inherent support by the rules of Chinese itself, but it's not necessarily the go-to phrasing historically in broad swathes of the Mandarin-speaking world, and some native speakers say they never hear anyone use it. But many native Mandarin speakers will swear that it's the only truly correct option.
There are still other ways to ask this question, including shortening the above sentences, but I would stick with those three choices to begin with.
Here are some Youtube videos teaching the "多少" version (which is the most common version on Youtube):
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Perhaps I overlooked the email informing me about this, but I just read this. Anyway, I've heard of 1 courtesy of Duolingo, and it makes sense to me. 2 I don't remember hearing or using, usually we use 3. It makes sense that 1 would be in a lot of YouTube videos if it is common among Northern speakers, as Mandarin is a northern dialect after all.
Thanks. Can you tell us a little more about your background? Where did you grow up? (If in China, what part?)
I lived in Taiwan for a couple of years so I'm very familiar with version 2.
[06/02/19] I read somewhere that when you ask the phone number 多少 should be used.
Is it necessary to be accurate? I just forgot the word 'the' and its wrong.
Now I wrote "What is the telephone number of the hospital?" instead of phone, and it was wrong. Duolingo is doing a very poor job here.
I got this wrong when trying "What is the hospital's phone number" and "What is the number to the hospital." Both should be correct.
What is the number of a [rather than the] hospital should have been accepted... There are no articles in Chinese??!!
"What is the phone number of hospital?" is wrong bcs I write "hospital" and should be "the hospital"..... come onnnnn
I wrote "What's the phone number of the hospital?" and it was wrong. This mistake should also be fixed. The answers accepted by the course are so restricted and many times so random that I'm feeling truly demotivated here. It's so frustrating when you notice you're learning wrong stuff.
Just report it, and have some perspective. I don't know if you were doing this course a couple of years ago when it first came out of beta, but it's far better now than it was then. For many questions the program now accepts literally thousands of responses. This is not an exaggeration.
It's a huge task to maintain the database. Forgive the Chinese team if they're still missing a few answer options. They're continually working on it.
I know, man, I know. It's easy to ask someone to have some perspective and to forgive the team, and nobody wants to be the one complaining about the whole thing. I just think that complaining is still a way to ensure that the course is constantly being improved. After all, people don't want a good language course. They want the best.
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I put what is the telephone number to the hospital and it was marked and correct. Phone and telephone are the same thing
No. I used to think so, but according to my tests, you can get away with using the traditional character set only if none of the characters in your sentence would be different if you were using the simplified set.
