45 Comments
There was even a snake in a newspaper yesterday, duo seems like a dangerous place!
I agree with Libellule808 but just to be pedantic I will say that Bilbo's sentence was proper. "well-guarded", not "well", is the adjective being modified by "more".
Looking forward to learning how the any given animal eats the mouse in the watery sugar.
can we actually use la mosca as a "beauty spot" like it says in the hints section? :)
è is impossible to hear in this one. Even on slow speed it just sounds like a hiccup and not an actual word.
Can't confirm this. I can hear it clearly. Maybe you just need some more time getting used to spoken Italian. Italians like to speak very fast.
425
I guess you're right. But if you think as a native speaker, you don't need to hear the "è" here because you get the sense anyway. But I agree that it doesn't help a beginner.
Can anyone explain why 'nello' is one word here rather than being written 'nel lo'?
Italians like it to contract prepositions and articles: 'nello', 'nella', 'nel', 'nei', 'alla', 'allo'.'sul','sullo',... Ýou just have to get used to it. BTW, 'nel' is already a contraction of 'in' and 'il'. (EDIT: error corrected, thanks to sfaulk5 for pointing it out)
Is there a way to type the "e" with the accent? It bugs me that I have to stop midsentence to go up and click it. =)
There actually is, but it takes some preparation and has nothing to do with Duolingo. Also this method assumes you use Windows. I don't know about other systems. So:
First, go to your Start menu and search "character map". Open the program, it's just a little box full of characters. Find the one you want and select it (you have to click it, then click select), then it will appear in the field at the bottom. From there you just copy it, and as long as you have it copied you can just hit Ctrl+V to whack it into the middle of your sentence :D
Of course, you can only do this for one character at a time, so I just use è as it's the most common. I hope this helps, it certainly speeds things up for me :)
Wow, it really makes a difference when you do that! Thanks.
~@AnonymousDecker
- 394
You can switch your keyboard config language to English (International) and you'll be able to type not just accents áàâ but also umlauts ü and other characters used in European languages.
Why can't the fly be ON the sugar? It makes just as much sense. What if the sugar was in a pile, and the fly landed on it?
- 425
That would be 'sullo'. A fly could've dug into the sugar and be in the jar, under several layers of sugar, therefore "nello" zucchero.
Many many years ago, when I was a kid, one could buy sugar cubes that contained a fake plastic fly (for entertainment reasons,I suppose). Hence la mosca era nello zucchero :-)
First the snake in the boot, then ants in the butter, and now flies are in the sugar!!! Whats going on here?!
