20 Comments
''crema'' is 'creme patisserie', so ''crema al cioccolato'' is chocolate flavoured custard. ''Panna'' is cream.
Actually, now that someone in another discussion provided a lovely explanation of what "chocolate cream" actually IS (a filling for eclairs, etc) the sentence makes perfect sense to me in English AND in Italian.
The english translation makes no sense. "The cook has XXXX" must be a mass term like 'typhoid' or 'gold'
FYI - we don't have a food in the U.S. called "chocolate cream," so this could be part of our confusion. We might say "chocolate custard," if this is what is meant.
1948
The way I understand it, regardless of the way this lesson is programmed into Duolingo, "custard" is the more accurate translation of "crema".
- 1948
"Il cuoco" is the correct way to say "the cook." "L'cuoco" makes no grammatical sense because "cuoco" begins with a consonant and "l'" is only for (masculine, singular) nouns that start with a vowel: l'uomo, l'ape, etc.
Seriously guys, what is chocolate cream, I am not understanding, is it like a custard cream - the biscuit?
I wrote "The cook has the chocolate cream" which was an accurate translation but I got it wrong. What gives? "La" means "the," so I included it. The scoring thing needs to on be fixed.
- 1948
Italian sometimes uses definite articles differently than we do in English. Just because a word is used in one language does not guarantee it's appropriate in another language.
This might be just me drawing parallels between Italian and other languages, but isn't "la" used when you know exactly which thing you are looking for? For exemple, if I'm looking for a bowl, any bowl, I might say "una ciottola", but if I'm looking for a specific bowl which I was telling my friend about, I would use "la ciottola".
Here, I feel like "Il cuoco ha la crema al cioccolato" would be the answer to a question like "Who has the custard" or "where is the custard" (the one that was prepared, as everyone in the conversation knows which custard they are speaking of: The cook has the custard). The English translation without an article seems like the cook just has some custard nobody knew about...
- 1948
Not in this case, no. This is just how Italian talks about food. In English, we can use nouns like they're adjectives, so we can say "flavor food" or "ingredient food", but in Italian they can't do that, so they say "food to the flavor" or "food of ingredient".
Even in English, when we use the long-form possessive, we use "the": "start of the day"; "head of the class"; etc.
Oh, it's not the "al cioccolato" that bothers me. It's the sudden disappearance of the article before "crema" in the English translation. English isn't my native language, but I always thought the article could only disappear like that when it doesn't matter which thing it is. (So the answer given in English, "The cook has chocolate cream" would mean he has "some chocolate cream". Meanwhile, the Italian sentence uses a definite article, so I don't understand why the translation isn't "the cook has the chocolate cream"
- 1948
I used to think I understood how it worked, but I was wrong. All I can say is that different languages use the definite article differently. The nuances where we use it or not in English are different from the nuances where they use it or not in Italian.
