Placement of 一点儿

[Pegasus]

Dear Chinese-Forums community,

Today, a friend of mine asked me how to say this in Chinese: "I know how to play a little bit of the khim." In other words, she can play the khim, but not very well. (Note: The khim is a musical instrument from Thailand that is similar to the 扬琴 yángqín.)

This should be very simple, but the part I'm not sure about is the placement of "一点儿" in the translation of "I know how to play a little bit of the khim."

My first thought is that "一点儿" should come after "弹" and before "khim" as in:

A.) 我会弹一点儿 khim。

And then, I started to wonder happen if "一点儿" came after "会" and before "弹" as in:

B.) 我会一点儿弹 khim。

B sounds wrong to me. But, is it wrong? Is it meaningless to put "一点儿" in this location, or does it change the meaning?

Lastly, my friend asked me if "一点儿" could be placed at the end of the sentence as in:

C.) 我会弹 khim 一点儿。

Is this wrong? Is it meaningless to put "一点儿" in this location, or could it also have a different meaning?

Or, am I completely off track? Would you say it differently?

Thank you for your advice and feedback. As always, I appreciate it.

[skylee]

A(O)

B(X)

C(X)

[Hugh]

As Skylee says, the second two are definitely weird. If you think about some sort of 'classic' 一点儿 sentence:

咱们吃点儿东西吧。

or something like that, you can see the standard structure for this:

[subject] [verb] [点儿] [object] [...]

From that I would think that your A sentence is correct.

You might be interested in this write-up I did in response to your question.

[lingo-ling]

B.) 我会一点儿弹khim - This is wrong. But if you remove 弹, then it's correct.

Cool... looks like Thai ขิม khim is a loanword from Chinese 琴 (Mandarin qin, Cantonese kam, Hokkien khim).