the newbie sentence about where I live

[fij]

Hi,

I am a beginner and I'm learning how to tell where I live ( = understand the question and reply ).

我住在南京 uses 住在

whereas

我在那儿住了2年 uses 在 and 住 appears only later in the sentence.

Oh, yes, and

在哪儿？ does not use 住 at all.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[SiMaKe]

我住在南京 uses 住在

whereas

我在那儿住了2年 uses 在 and 住 appears only later in the sentence.

在哪儿？ does not use 住 at all.

Your question involves some of the interesting aspects of Chinese.

First, 住在 is a combination of verb (住) + locative phrase marker (在). Generally, location phrases are placed before the verb. So the general sentence form is location phrase + verb. However, certain (classes of) verbs allow the location phrase to be placed after the verb. Suffice it to say,住 is one of those verbs. A more comprehensive discussion of the placement of location phrases will come later in your learning. If you just can't wait, such a discussion can be found in Li & Thompson's A Functional Reference Grammar. I suspect most quality textbooks at least address this issue at some point.

Second, your sentence 我在那儿住了2年 is comprised of several parts. Here the location phrase 在那儿 is in the usual pre-verbal position so you can think of this as the standard or typical position. 2年 is a verb complement called a time-measure complement. They come after the verb.

Third, 在哪儿？presents another interesting, and pervasive, feature of Chinese, namely the importance of context. In fact, the phrase/question is difficult to deal with without some context. As a standalone, the phrase just means "where" or "is located where". The context may involve any number of situations where "living" is not the issue. For example, "where were you born", "where is the bathroom", etc.

Pardon me if I misunderstood your question.

[dumdumdum]

compare:

'i stayed at this particular location' and

'at this particular location i stayed for 2 years', then maybe its easier to understand.