どこに vs どこで vs どこも vs どこか

I juat need someone to explain the differences between these four? I’m confused. I tried looking them up meaningwise in jisho and they all seem similar.

Doesn’t this basically boil down to how the individual particles work? If you have that down, then adding どこ doesn’t affect much. How is your understanding of the particles?

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I still get de and ni confused a lot. They seem interchangeable. But what I know of mo, I still don’t think I’d get it just by saying it’s doko with that particle attached.

Well, も and か have special uses when attached to question words, we’ll set that aside for now.

に and で aren’t interchangeable.

に is the particle for indicating existence in this case.

で in this case indicates where an action takes place.

So whether you’re talking about something existing somewhere or whether you’re talking about doing something somewhere determines which you need.

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どこも is a mobile phone provider. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I always found that explaining the difference between で and に really hard to conceptualize from an English perspective. It wasn’t until I came across 新完全マスター’s explanation which used images. Hopefully this helps to clarify what @Leebo explains in his post.

廊下絵を描いている
%E3%81%BA%E3%82%93%E3%81%A6%E3%82%8B%E3%82%AD%E3%83%A3%E3%83%8E%E3%83%B33-590x443

廊下(紙に)絵を描いている
IMG_9285

EDIT: Not perfect because the students are drawing on the wall, the main distinction is the drawing. In the first picture, the students are painting a mural(?) in the hallway. In the other picture, the students are just doing the activity of drawing in the hallway. Please note that the floor and walls are free of doodles.

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Yeah, when I said they’re not interchangeable, I meant in the strict sense that swapping them does change the meaning of the sentence in cases where both are possible.

For instance

公園に木を植える
and
公園で木を植える

Both can be translated as “to plant trees in the park” but the first sentence focuses on where the trees are planted (the existence usage of に) while the second sentence focuses on what is being done in the park (the place of action usage of で)

You can imagine them being responses to different questions.

どこに木を植える?
公園に木を植える

公園で何をする?
公園で木を植える

These are slightly unnatural interactions because of the repeated info, but it’s to illustrate the differences.

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My post was supposed to refer to situations where they seem to overlap, which is the reason why people have trouble because it’s usually the same explanation (place of action vs. place of existence) that gets used to explain this concept. Unfortunately they get conflated because the place the action takes place seems to be the place of existence. That is why I found having a visual can help to separate these concepts.

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