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- "Nós temos amado o curso de g…
"Nós temos amado o curso de geografia."
Translation:We have been adoring the geography course.
18 Comments
Oh coommmee onnn..... The continuing pains of being a beta tester. DuoLingo, you're lucky I love you... and when I say "love you" I mean "te amo", you know, the correct usage.
My opinion is that the best translation is simply "We loved the geography course". The continuing action (we still love geography) is implied, and any other English tense (we have loved ..., we have been loving ...) sounds clumsy and unnatural.
From my textbook and my Portuguese instructor concurs: "Amar is less commonly used in Portuguese than in English. It speaks of deep feelings, the kind that lead to the alter. Instead, the Portuguese, tend to use gostar muito de .... or adorar."
We have been enjoying the geography course.
Unlike "love", enjoy is used progressively.
If you switch to "class" and omit the definite article, the "love" usage suddenly becomes idiomatic again: "My son's been loving French class this year. It's a walk in the park for him." Or if you switch to the MUCH more natural possessive adjective before course: "I've been loving my poly sci course this semester. It sure brightens up my Mondays!"
Someday, as the language continues to evolve, I am sure that it will be graded as correct on a TOEFL exam or the SAT verbal, but until then, it's a disservice to teach that progressive form to learners of English.
Incidentally, Grammar Girl agrees with you! http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/is-im-loving-it-proper-grammar And yet, language evolves and it gets complicated when we use traditionally stative verbs in a dynamic context: "I'm seeing a bit of resistance on his part" (yet "I'm seeing the snow from my window" rings very false). Ad execs and artists always reach for the superlative, which is likely why they break the "rules." :-)
Your example: "I'm seeing a bit of resistance on his part" is an example of how the progressive use of a stative verb changes the meaning of the verb. That sentence can be restated as "I am experiencing a bit of resistance on his part". Quite different from "I'm seeing snow from my window."
Perhaps we need a phrase to make it work in English: "We've been delighted with our geography course (so far this semester)." The usage of the definite article in front of "geography course" seems very stilted. English speakers would naturally personalize it. "Enjoy" is weaker than "amar" and we all agree that "adore" is unidiomatic.
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I wrote: "We have fallen in love with the geography course." It was marked incorrect because I didn't use the plural "courses". But "o curso" is singular. Should "o curso de geografia" be translated into "the geography courses" in English?
I'm pretty sure knaverex is right -- and note that the same bug shows up when I tried "...the geography class" which is similarly rejected in favor of "...the geography classes." I can't believe there's any justification for translating curso into some plural noun in English -- is there??
This strikes me as a translation that may work one way (from English to Portuguese, in some cases), but doesn't work well in the other direction.
"I've been learning a lot in my French classes this semester" is an example in which English casually uses "classes" when we actually mean " course."
This is just the type of exceptions that language learning methods tend to focus on, as the other instances of usage where the languages align perfectly are not typically problematic for learners.
I run into this phenomenon a lot when French translators take certain liberties with the English text, which then have to be removed when those structures come up in texts for translation back into English.
