"Is the restaurant there?"
Translation:饭馆在那儿吗？
23 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
I thought tha when you used nar you didn't use ma. How do I know when to use it? Earlier i didn't use it and it was correct
吗 turns a statement into a yes-or-no question. Also, 那儿 "there" is not a question word. 哪儿 "where" is. Note the box at the left of "where".
864
why isn't 饭馆儿 accepted? That's what I learned and it's what I thought I heard often while living 3 years in Beijing. It's also what my Chinese keyboard suggests.
儿 ending is a Beijing thing. Not all Mandarin speakers use this and its not necessary. It's not accepted because Duolingo's tests aren't very good or robust, lol, it should be.
You should not be downvoted, you are correct. I also learned to add 儿 as well in school in Beijing. My understanding is that this is a Beijing-dialect thing to add 儿 to words so although not all Mandarin speakers add this, as Beijing does, so goes the language generally.
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That's a little different in meaning. What you wrote would mean "is there a restaurant there?" instead of "is the restaurant there?" One of them is asking about whether any restaurant exists in a specific spot. The other could be asking about a specific restaurant (depending on context... But the English implies a specific restaurant).
- 70
It is definitely not a necessity and both ways are good, although people also substitute the 儿 with 里, which is a way of checking if someone is a 北方人 i.e. from the north, or a 南方人 i.e. from the south, which includes Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and the diaspora in Malaysia, Singapore etc.
Set the input language on your device to Chinese and choose "pinyin" if it gives options for types of input. The pinyin for 儿 is "ér". Type "er" and "儿" should pop up ad an option.
