"Have you seen my cell phone?"
Translation:你看见我的手机了吗?
52 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
That's pretty close. It's the difference between a completed action in any time frame (verb 了) versus a present state having come into being (sentence 了) with immediate relevance.
For this sentence we can simplify by saying that verb 了 would be like "did you see..." and sentence 了 would be like "have you seen..."
I wanted to put this information higher up on the page for the sake of convenience, but dafadllyn's comment below is on point:
I would usually think of the first one as "Did you see my mobile phone" but otherwise I think your interpretations are fair.
However, translations can vary a bit, given that the various constructions don't correlate absolutey with English verb forms, and I have a slightly different take on the versions with sentence-了, which you can read in another comment of mine:
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According to this site, 了 after a verb indicates a completed action while 了 at the end of a sentence indicates a new situation or an immediate relevance of a statement, which seems to be the case here.
Edit: Even when asking questions about completed actions, 了 doesn't come directly after the verb as usual, but just before 吗 (see here). Example:
他昨天去工作了吗?
I think it’s because 看见 is a result complement, i.e. 看 on its own means look but does not include actually seeing. 看见 means to look and see. See 见 is the result.
For verbs that include a result, I think past tense is more natural. For example, “I have seen” is more natural than “I’m seeing”. Probably with or without 了 are both fine for conveying past tense.
Read more here: https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/Result_complement
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Seems like this is a mistake on Duo's part. The explanation for this lesson explicitly says:
To ask Have you seen... (when looking for something or someone) use the pattern 你看见 + the thing or person you’re looking for + 了吗?
Lol I'm Chinese but I had to think about the difference between verb 了 and sentence 了. So personally, 你看见了我手机吗?implies something like "I got a new phone, did you see it yet?" asking if you've completed the action of "seeing" it already.
你看见我手机了吗?is what I usually would use if I misplaced my phone and I'm asking someone if they've seen it yet. But to be honest, I find the two sentences interchangeable.
My sense is of it is as follows (though I defer to native Chinese speakers):
Using only sentence 了 (as in the sentence at hand) makes the question more immediately relevant to the present moment: Have you seen my cell phone, and by implication, can you now tell me where it is?
Using both verb 了 and sentence 了, on the other hand (as in the "book" example), is more an inquiry about life experience: Have you had the opportunity to take a look at her book? (I'm taking liberties with the translation to exaggerate the different sense.)
In the right context (and with the appropriate time phrase) the latter structure is also used to express ongoing duration: I've been living here for five years, and by implication, I'm still living here. 我在这儿住了五年了。
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《你看见了不看见了我的手机?》is marked as wrong. Do we not use expressions with 了 in 《 …不… 》form of the question?
The problem is that "不看见了" doesn't make sense in Chinese (at least in this context, and I can't think of one where it would). "没(有)看见" is the proper negative form for a past action that didn't happen, and "了" is never used when the past action referred to by the verb was not completed, but only when it was .
(The only time that "没(有)" and "了" are used together is when the meaning is "no more".)
You can say "你有没有看见..." or you can say the entire affirmative sentence and then tack "没有" on the end as an alternative to "吗" and to the simpler "verb-not-verb" structure.
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Thank you! Very clear explanation! I also now understand why my attempt to construct a phrase with 《 …不… 》, including large verbal constructions, is wrong.