Thursday, September 5, 2019

questions - How to ask for ordinal date?


Let's say my friend's just arrived in New York 4 days ago. I could ask him "How many days have you been in New York?", and he would answer me something like "4 days." But if I want him to answer me, "This is my fourth day in New York."



  1. What are the natural ways to ask for that kind of answer?


  2. Do people say "This is your what day in NY?"?


PS: I've read these two posts about the same topic but I want to know about this specific usage and I'm not sure whether I should ask this inside the posts or not, so I decided to start a new post. Asking the position of a person in a sequence, How to ask a question which implies an ordinal number as an answer?.



Answer



You wouldn't.


You got all the same info (four days vs my fourth day) by asking the question normally, so it shouldn't really be surprising that there isn't a simple, easy, comfortable way to force someone into answering in an unusual manner.


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