"Where in London does Teacher Wang live?"
Translation:王老师住在伦敦哪儿?
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Can I interpret this as a relative clause inside there, as if a "that/who" was omitted?
王老师(, that/who)在伦敦(,)住在哪儿? Where in London does teacher Wang live? Vs. Where does teacher Wang, who is in London, live?. May sound a bit off, but just to make it more logical (for me) to understand Chinese grammar haha
The model answer is 王老师住在伦敦哪里 which needs only one 在. 王老师在伦敦住在哪里 is also possible and you could even make it work with one 在 by omitting the one after 住. However to me that sounds more like you're not talking about a permanent residence but only a temorary one for the stay in London, more along the lines of: "When Teacher Wang is in London, where does he stay?" 住在伦敦哪里 would be understood as "I know hw lives/stays in London, but in which area whithin London?"
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Keep in mind, using Duolingo through a web browser gives the option to type answers rather than choose characters.
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王老师住哪儿在伦敦?- sound informal as a native speaker, but if conversation among native speaker , still alright and understandable , well , learn the right way
The model answer is 王老师住在伦敦哪里 which needs only one 在. 王老师在伦敦住在哪里 is also possible and you could even make it work with one 在 by omitting the one after 住. However to me that sounds more like you're not talking about a permanent residence but only a temorary one for the stay in London, more along the lines of: "When Teacher Wang is in London, where does he stay?" 住在伦敦哪里 would be understood as "I know hw lives/stays in London, but in which area whithin London?"
You wrote nàr 那儿 “there” instead of nǎr 哪儿 “where”. Since 那儿 is also an existing word, Duolingo counts that as a vocabulary mistake rather than a typo.
You do sometimes see the character 那 without the 口 being used a variant of 哪 with the 口, particularly in older sources when modern Chinese orthography wasn’t standardised yet. The big official dictionaries do list this use of 那 (both the PRC Hanyu da cidian 汉语大词典 and the ROC Zhongwen da zidian 中文大字典 do – although interestingly at least the online version of the (PRC) Xinhua zidian 新华字典 does not), but the examples they give are all pre-standardisation, so I’m not entirely sure if using 那 instead of 哪 is still considered acceptable according to standard orthography. You definitely hardly if ever encounter this in modern texts which pay attention to correct spelling. You do sometimes see it in environments like chatting where orthography plays a more subordinate role, but in such environments you can explain it as simply a typo. So I would strongly advise you distinguish the two in all places and always write 哪 for the question word nǎ.
Is your sentence allowed in your dialect of English (assuming you’re a native speaker)? To me it doesn’t sound like grammatical English:
- teacher is missing an article
- in London where doesn’t sound grammatical to me
- Putting the phrase that contains the question word anywhere but at the very front of the sentence is not strictly speaking forbidden, but restricted to very specific situations, none of which I can imagine to apply to in London where.