User Comments - brucejackson

Posted on: Please Speak Mandarin!

The key word in your sentence is 可以 （kěyǐ）which does mean willing to speak putonghua or "may you" You can replace this word with either 会 or 能 or 愿意 and it still basically means the same thing in conversational use. In fact, I usually default to 你会说中文马？

Avoiding the ambiguous verb "can", you could translate them as:

会 (hui)- able to

能 (neng)- possible to

愿意 (yuanyi) - willing to

可以 (keyi) - may

Posted on: I Work in Shanghai

我在上海工作 is just the correct grammatical structure to say "I work in Shanghai".

The other way,我工作在上海, or more correctly 我的工作在上海 would mean "my work at Shanghai" ,yet is sounds sort of incomplete to me...like it is missing some qualifying word.