"Where is the hospital?"

Translation: 医院在哪儿？

[ClarkSchol]

What is the difference between "na er" and "na li?"

[cafe_disco]

Yes, adding 儿 to certain words is characteristic of the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The term for this process is 儿化 (erhua). If anyone's interested, here's a link to the wikipedia page for it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhua

[silvermime7]

Na er is a northern accent. Na li is used more throughout china but people will understand you either way

[super-dupe]

Correct

[O_bliv]

What's the difference between 'where is the hospital?' and 'the hospital is there.' ? Both are 医院在哪儿, right?

[Kuma57]

The two "na" characters are different. 那 means there, whereas 哪 means where. The little box makes a difference

[Fiyalka2]

And also very important are the tones:
哪 nǎ - where?
Third tone, your voice goes slightly down but then in the end up, just like a question in English (Whěre do you think you go?).
那 nà - there!
Fourth tone, your voice goes from high up straight down, the tone comes quite close to how you would say it in Englisch: Thère, I told you so! ;o)

[Andrew-Lin]

醫院在_哪兒？/哪裡(lǐ)？
哪裡(trad.)/哪里(simp.) is another way to express "where" and interchangeable with "哪兒/哪儿", but the former is more formal.

[FTWFabian]

Is the 儿 is 那儿 just phonetic?

[brezbrez]

Phonetically how are you supposed to tell 哪儿(where)? apart from there 那儿 ? We only know because the characters are provided!!

[Fiyalka2]

This is where the tones come in handy. 哪儿 is third tone and 那儿 is fourth tone. See my comment above.

[Riollee]

What about this? 医院是哪里