Learn how to ask where somebody is
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| Hēi , dàjiā hǎo , wǒ jiào Mǎ Yànrú .Hi everybody! I’m YanruMa. |
| Welcome to ChineseClass101.com’s “Sān fēnzhōng Hànyǔ”. The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Chinese. |
| In the last lesson, we learned how to talk about nationality. In this lesson, we are going to learn how to talk about location, to say things like "I am in the street" or "He is in the room", so let’s go! |
| When you want to know where something or someone is, you use the word zài in Chinese. |
| For example, when someone asks you on the phone Nǐ zài nǎlǐ ? That means "Where are you?" |
| Let's break it down. |
| nǐ means "you", |
| the word zài is used before words for places and directions. |
| And nǎlǐ , is the word for "where" |
| So all together it is Nǐ zài nǎlǐ ?. |
| [slowly] Nǐ zài nǎlǐ ? |
| Answering this question is very easy! You just say Wǒ zài + the place where you are. |
| wǒ zài means “I am” and then you add the place. So for example, you can say Wǒ zài xuéxiào which is "I am at school" |
| [slowly] Wǒ zài xuéxiào . |
| Now let’s see a few other possible answers with “I”: |
| "I am at the office" would be Wǒ zài bàngōngshì . |
| "I am at home" would be Wǒ zài jiā . . |
| "I am in a store" would be Wǒ zài shāngdiàn . . |
| I am sure you have noticed that at the end of every lesson, I say Zài jiàn ! Here we have a zài too. But be careful : this zài is totally different from the zài in this lesson. They are of different characters and different meanings. Zài in zài jiàn means “again”, or “once more”, so please don’t mix them up. |
| Now it’s time for Yanru’s tips. |
| Also you can use the word zài to tell a friend where your house is. For example, Wǒ jiā zài huāyuán Jiē, which means I live at Garden Street. |
| (One more time, slowly: Wǒ jiā zài huāyuán Jiē). Here you can replace huāyuán Jiē (Garden Street,) with whatever place you would like to say. |
| In this lesson we learned how to talk about your location thanks to the word zài . Next time we’ll learn how to talk about ages in Chinese. So do you want to know how to ask somebody’s age? I’ll be waiting for you in the next lesson. |
| Zài jiàn ! |
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