Hello everyone,
I am studying grammar with Genki I but there are certain situations that are not clear to me with the に particle.
Is it correct that you use the particle に twice in a sentence?
Example:
私は二時にレストランに行きます
Or would it be the correct structure the next sentence?
私は二時レストランに行きます
Thank you very much for the help, any comments are appreciated.
I think you can and should use に twice to be precise. But I asked ChatGPT to be sure. Here’s its answer:
Yes, it is absolutely correct to use に twice in a sentence, as in your first example:
私は二時にレストランに行きます。
(Watashi wa ni-ji ni resutoran ni ikimasu.)
“I will go to the restaurant at 2 o’clock.”
In this sentence:
Both uses of に are grammatically correct and natural.
Yes, you can say: 私は二時レストランに行きます。
(Watashi wa ni-ji resutoran ni ikimasu.)
This is understandable, but it’s slightly less common in standard Japanese, especially in written form. The particle に after 二時 makes the sentence more precise and formal, especially if you’re focusing on the specific time the action occurs. However, in casual speech, omitting the first に is sometimes acceptable.
Your first sentence (二時にレストランに行きます) is grammatically correct and natural. It’s perfectly fine to use に twice in a sentence when marking time and destination. Your second sentence is understandable but feels more casual and less precise.
Yes, you can use に twice. に is used in this sentence for time, ( 二時に ). and direction ( に行きます ).
(i know nothing about grammar… im an embarrassment to any language rules 
)
but i think both sentence should have で to them.
私は二時にレストランで行きます
or
私は二時でレストランに行きます
i feel で: is where/when you exactly going
right!
The difference between で and に can sometimes get a little confusing, but に would be the correct usage here.
に is used for exact time. 二時に is correct.
に is also used for direction. If you’re using the verb 行きます it would take に。
As an addition to what @soggyboy wrote, で as a particle signifies the place where some form of activity happens 
For example:
図書館 で本を読む = to read a book at the library
レストランで晩ご飯を食べる = to eat dinner at the restaurant
It’s probably not so useful for people who have not studied Russian or a similar language, but for me で is the “instrumental” particle, which is the means used to perform something. You can sort of translate it using “by way of” or “using”.
“I eat using the restaurant” is awkward sounding but you get the idea, the restaurant enables you to eat. “I go using the restaurant” is weird because the restaurant is not what enables you to go anywhere. You go to the restaurant. It’s the objective, not the means you use to get there.
It even sort of works more generally with the て form of verbs since they are generally adverbial. 朝ご飯を食べて、学校に行きます。“I go to school by way of eating breakfast”. It’s extremely awkward but you can tell that there’s a similar idea, eating breakfast is a necessary step in order to reach the final state. I eat breakfast, then I go to school, in this order.
In my experience ChatGPT is good at translating but you should absolutely not trust it for grammatical explanations, or at least not without thoroughly double-checking its claims. It will often make up utter nonsense that sounds very plausible at a glance. I even had situations where it will correctly translate a sentence but then spew absurdities when asked to break down and explain the sentence structure.
Thank you for answering my question, it was quite clear
This is also what the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar gives as its idea of the core meaning of で, from which the means, cause, material, location, cost, etc uses all derive. Conversely it has “contact” as the core meaning of に, which the various uses as direction, location of existence, point in time, etc derive from. (If you have the Dictionary, it has little tree diagrams with examples.)
But if your native language doesn’t happen to have anything that maps obviously to this, I’m not sure how helpful it is to try to squish them all into a single bucket. It might be better to start with the more usual textbook approach of considering them as different uses of the particles.
(More generally I can recommend the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar as a reference to supplement a textbook and give more detailed explanations and examples when there’s something the textbook has covered but you didn’t quite get.)
You can use any particle infinitely many times in a sentence as long as the grammar works out that way.
It would be strange if Japanese sentences were somehow super limited in expression.
not to undermine everyone’s explanations here
but the に particle here is literally interchangeable with “at”
I did [thing] に [place] に [time]
I did [thing] at [place] at [time].
but don’t forget there’s a lot of nuance of when you can use に when regards to time
I only know a basic version which is technically correct, but my mnemonic doesn’t actually cover all cases. Just makes sure my cases are correct 
I’ve found that the problem with thinking of に as “at” is that then it gets confusing when で should be used instead, like Redglare’s examples.
very true! especially where movement verbs are concerned, you can even use を for some!
公園を歩く
but now I’m obfuscating things
I feel like it’s about time we replaced the に particle with “Ekke Ekke Ekke Ekke Ptang Zoo Boing!”, as nature intended.
only if you bring a shrubbery
“As long as the grammar works out that way” is rather dodging the question, though – the OP’s query is essentially “does the grammar work out if you do it like this” ? (The answer being “yes, it does”.)
There is actually a well-known-in-linguistics grammar constraint of this type for Japanese: the “double-o constraint”, which says that you can only have one を attaching to any given verb. It was first proposed by Harada in 1973 as the reason why for a causative of an intransitive verb you can mark the person being forced to to the action with を:
一郎は雪子を走らせた
but for a transitive verb it is not grammatical to use を and you must mark the person being made to do the action with に:
一郎は雪子にりんごを食べさせた
(For a start on the linguistics side of it Poser’s paper is probably a reasonable place to start: http://www.billposer.org/Papers/oo.pdf ).
That said, I don’t think textbooks try to teach this as a “rule” and I don’t think it’s really necessary to think about it – apart from the causatives, which it’s simpler to teach as “they work like this”, there aren’t really any situations where you’d even think about having multiple を in a clause; and the linguists seem to still be arguing about exactly what the rule ought to be anyway
My point was just that if that kind of rule existed, that a single sentence was limited to one of any particular particle, it would result in an absurd situation.
The question is broader than something like “can you use two を with one verb”, it’s just about being in the same sentence. And since any natural language should be able to make infinitely long sentences, surely there can be multiple of the same particle at some point.
Perhaps the OP meant something more like what you’re imagining and I’m just being unfair by taking it literally.