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- "我的朋友昨天在纽约。"
"我的朋友昨天在纽约。"
Translation:My friend was in New York yesterday.
35 Comments
As I understand it, 了 is used for completed actions. I would say, being somewhere isn't necessarily completing something, so you wouldn't use 了.
How important is the word order of the sentence? I ask because in English we could day My friend was in New York yesterday or Yesterday my friend was in New York.
375
why 们 - in other cases they mix singular and plural together - a man could only guess how many person is the sentence about :(
Why is 了 not used with 在?
I think of it this way: I don't say, "I was atted New York yesterday." In Chinese "to be" verbs remain the same regardless of the time frame. 在 is a verb that includes "to be"in its meaning along with "at." So I literally say with 在, "Today I am at; tomorrow I am at; and yesterday I am at."
So I read a fluentu article recently, which basically said, if I am not mistaken, that Chinese has no tenses, so I would say that they just used the the day to validate when the event occurred. Hopefully I am understanding what both you and the article I mentioned are saying. https://www.fluentu.com/blog/chinese/2013/10/30/chinese-sentence-structure/. Thus, I would say that your consideration of zai as a more or less perpetually "present tense" verb would be correct, but I would think of zai as "in" or "at" in this context, but then I do not know why duolingo would be teaching us le and zai to go before or after words...
As in English 纽约 is just New York. It usually refers to the city but it depends on the context. If it's ambiguous you can be more specific by saying 纽约市 (New York City) or 纽约州 (New York State).
I live in upstate NY, and when i travel to different parts of the country when people say "New York" they could be referring to the city or the state depending on where i am and the context of the conversation.
In the state of NY people downstate are usually referring to the city when they say "New York", people upstate are usually referring to the state when they say the same thing.
So even in english it can mean either depending on the context of the conversation when it isnt specified
why "my friend yesterday was in new york" cannot be accepted? english is not my mther language so I cannot feel the difference!
My friend yesterday was in New York - This was my answer, which means the same in English as the one that Duolongo gave...
My friend was in New York yesterday. My friend yesterday was in New York. The same because I am learning Chinese NOT English
The part about learning a language is that you should understand it and be able to translate it back to how you would say it.
To be fair both are perfectly valid English, I hope you filed a report, it'll be fixed... eventually.
My friend was in New York yesterday. My friend yesterday was in New York...same meaning. It is English so why ..WRONG????????????
"My friend was yesterday in New York" im not a native English speaker but I have the feeling this should be accepted
Funny, but i disagree. As if learning Chinese was not difficult enough that I also need to watch how proper my English is. I signed up for chinese lessons...
DL isn't very good at abbreviations even in courses graduated from beta.
