"他喜欢在雨里唱歌。"
Translation:He likes singing in the rain.
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1883
Thanks for that, Keith. It took me a bit to get that, even though my mind had immediately already been on him. Yeah, foreign people's and place names are often rendered differently not only in different parts of the Chinese speaking world, but even just different sources:
金凯利 is the heading for Gene Kelly in Wikipedia, and a Google search for 真基利 also leads you to him, though Google translate (often reasonably good at names of people or places) doesn't get either one, in isolation anyway. A Google search for 金凯利 gave more top hits for Jim Carrey, though it also showed the Wikipedia article for Gene Kelly. Baidu also redirected 金凯利 to 金凯瑞 = Jim Carrey. Their article about Gene Kelly has the heading 吉恩凯利. Hey, we sometimes have to try to match Wade-Giles with Pinyin, never mind, then wondering what the tones are when we don't even have the Hanzi.
1715
Just by knowing what I was talking about shows that you are great in Chinese. :-)
Many resources on the internet, although provided in different language version, are not at all the same in content. Knowing the original language make us wiser! Perhaps some Chinese would think that Jim Carrey was the one singing Broadway?
在雨中 makes better sense. You are in the middle of the rain, not enclosed by it like a box. 在雨里 sounds like translationese.
I tried 在雨下 which is how a Ukrainian or Russian would say it, but Duolingo didn't seem to like that. [Edit: My Chinese friends didn't like it either, but they said 在雨里 and 在雨中 are both OK.]
In this and other questions like it with two verbs, I keep getting caught out putting the location in the wrong place, i.e. preceding the first verb or the second verb.
他喜欢在雨里唱歌 Vs 他在雨里喜欢唱歌
Is there a grammar rule to follow here, or is it really just the difference between “he likes to [sing in the rain]” vs “[in the rain he likes] to sing”? If there is a difference in meaning in English here, it’s so subtle that I would never detect it in practice. Is the distinction more important in Mandarin?
114
2020.7.10
Generally you want to put time, place, how, all that stuff before the main verbs
The only exceptions I can think off the top of my head, is when you have helper verbs such as 会,想,要 etc and even then putting it before will probably be okay
我会 在超市 买很东西。Here I think it is better to sandwich it and split the 会和买