Le in the middle or at the end?

[webmagnets]

Is there a difference between the following sentences?:

Wo renshi le xin de gu ke.

and

Wo renshi xin de gu ke le.

[Long Zhiren]

What are you trying to say?

[webmagnets]

"I met new customers."

Pimsleur says it the first way. I want to know if it means the same thing as the second way.

[necroflux]

[bS]No, there's no difference, you can put the 了 wherever you like and it all means the same.[/bS]

*sigh*, oh how I wish that were true. In actuality yes, where you put the "le" changes the sentence and it's nearly impossible to memorize when and when not to use it with simple rules. What is called the "sentence final 了" is a bit more discrete and understandable than other uses of the word, so I guess that's something.

[webmagnets]

What would the two different translations be then?

[gougou]

What I recall from my first Chinese book is the following rule: if the object is specified (e.g. by a numeral, or an adjective, like in this case xin), the le follows the verb. If the object is not specified, it follows the object.

So the following two sentences would be possible:

Wo renshi le xin de guke.

Wo renshi guke le.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of other rules, most of which I don't recall now, which sometimes will lead you to having two le's in one sentence.

[Jose]

I think "wo renshi le xin de guke" is much more usual than the other one, and that's the one you should use if what you want to say is simply "I met new customers". This is one of those difficult points in Chinese grammar that we all find difficult. I'll try to offer you my interpretation, which may not be correct.

Basically, inserting le between a verb and its object indicates a complete action, similar to a past tense in English. So, "wo renshi le xin de guke" just means "I met new customers", an event that happened in the past. You can use a verb + le + object construction to say sentences like "I wrote a letter" or "I bought two books". The reason why grammars refer to this le as a marker of completion ("perfective aspect") rather than as past tense is that it can also be used to mark a point in the future from which something else happens, as in English "When I meet the new customers, I will tell them that..." or "When I write the letter, I will think about it". Such "when..." sentences can be rendered with this kind of le, I think.

As for the final sentence le, it usually indicates that a situation (or the speaker's perception of it) has changed. For example, while "wo bu xi yan" means "I don't smoke", "wo bu xi yan le" means "I don't smoke any more". So, your sentence "wo renshi xin de guke le" would be more like "and now I have met some new customers" (maybe a change in situation, after not meeting any new customers for a long time). While the first kind of le is reasonably straightforward, using this final-sentence le is very tricky for us foreign learners.

The rule mentioned by gougou is probably a consequence of the semantics of the two kinds of "le", since objects that express concrete amounts are likely to be part of events happenning at a definite point in time ("I bought three books yesterday") while indefinite objects are more likely to appear in the second kind of le-sentence ("I have been buying a lot of books these days").

[gougou]

Also, read the grammar thread on le in case you haven't done so yet