47 Comments
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I think the literal translation should also be accepted. "To the girl, juice is not pleasing"
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Totally agree. This is an extremely important concept. Literal translations help us to learn and to think the way Italians do about their sentence construction. Why would anyone mark it wrong?
Absolutely correct. I do not understand why duo does not let us learn literal translations. Knowing what it means literally helps the process of understanding go more quickly. The way they do it now just makes it more confusing and takes longer to learn.
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Especially if it's this way around. I get that we should always get the normal way of phrasing it in the language we are learning, but there is very little reason to not allow phrasing that is somewhat special in the base language, if it helps us understand the logic behind it. I mean obviously, if some italian uses this app to learn english, it should teach him "x likes y", but as we are studying the other way around, duo can at least give us sone hint we can click on or sth that gives the "weird" phrasing to grasp the logic. When i try to explain stuff like this to someone in this comment section, i always try to convei the logic behind the italian phrasing, even if it might sound weird in english
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becuase in English it's "the girl doesn't like the juice" like normal? I guess though the same concept is in my language (Croatian) and as I've seen in Spanish. And German has the same as in English I think.
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Actually in German, the phrase would be "Der Saft gefällt dem Mädchen nicht" which would directly translate to, "The juice is not pleasing to the girl." There are a lot of grammatical nuances you learn when you translate the phrase directly that are incredibly important. I think the direct translation should be accepted in this case.
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Das Mädchen mag den Saft nicht = Der Saft gefällt dem Mädchen nicht. The first one is similar to English one, the second one is the same as in Romance Languages (at least Spanish, Italian as I know) and Slavic ones. or ... dem Mädchen gefällt der Saft nicht, if you want, literally the same word order as in the example above. but okay, they could have enabled it "the juice is not pleasing to the girl" to get the idea.
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That's the problem with translation: it's more of an art than an exact science. If you gave me that sentence in Italian and told me to translate it into German, I could think of a dozen different ways to get the concept across. But you are right: Dem Mädchen gefaällt der Saft nicht would probably the closest equivalent.
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alla ragazza= a + la + ragazza. Italian combines the preposition a with il, la, le, i, gli. the preposition a goes with the verb "to like", piacere. So the sentence would read "TO THE girl, juice is not pleasing" or "the juice is not pleasing TO THE girl". The combination of to + the=a+la=alla
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There are probably a few more. When i learned french, there was about a dozen verbs that had a different "perspective" than in my native language (german, which usually has it the same way as english). For instance, in french you are not calling someone, you are calling TO someone if i remember right. Has been over a decade. Might be the same in italian.
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There needs to be some interpretive acceptance in these answers. If you translate it per word we see the syntax. But syntax is not explained in duolingo, it is assumed that you should know.
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No. It is assumed that you get it wrong the first time and learn from it. Duolingo isnt set up for you to be able to answer everything perfectly the first time around. Humans learn well through making mistakes and being told so.
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The emphasis on the audio for "piace" is weird. Not "pee-AH-tche" as it should sound, but "pee-ah-TCHE".
Maybe a native speaker can weigh in. Is it because it's being elided into "il" that it sounds like the emphasis is in a different place?
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"The girl does not like the juice" is the correct answer presented to me. In so far as my learning by this program has dictated, this would be translated as: "La ragazza non piace il succo"
So.... what is alla and how is it translated? As far as I can see there is no explanation given, nor example that illustrates what it means, or how it is used. Hovering over "Alla" I see "to the" as the English translation. This is not represented in the English translation.
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'Piace' as a verb seems to need an indirect animate object, so it needs a preposition ('a') to introduce that object ('la ragazza').
'a' + 'la' = 'alla' literally meaning 'to the'
So the literal translation of "Alla ragazza non piace il succo" is 'To the girl, not pleasing = the juice', which is not good English. 'The girl does not like the juice' is the normal English way to express this idea.
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Piace follows the same logic as "appeal". You can't always translate litterally
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Because 'piace' is acting upon the 'ragazza'. DuoLingo provides a non direct translation as the correct answer in this case because a direct translation is somewhat awkward English, but in reality piace doesn't mean "X pleases Y," it means "Y is pleasing to X" which is why you need 'alla' instead of just 'la,' since 'alla' means 'to the (X).'
In other words:
La ragazza = The girl Alla ragazza = To the girl
The problem with using the indirect translation of "The girl does not like the juice" is that it changes the subject of the sentence, leading to confusion as to why the other words in the sentence are as they are.
In 'The girl does not like juice" the girl is the subject of the sentence, and is performing the verb (in this case, "like"). This is how we usually express the phrase in English.
In "The juice is not pleasing to the girl" (or "To the girl, the juice is not pleasing"), the juice is the subject and is acting upon the girl. With sentences that use piace, the subject is the thing that is pleasing to something else.
I'm not an expert or anything, but I hope that helps explain it. Keeping the subject straight in a sentence is very important for translation. Even if you have to change it to make it a smooth translation, you need to at least be aware that you are changing it.
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unfortunately, you are adding extra words with the "with" and duolingo doesn't like that, try to stick with what's given and it should work
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What's the point of ''Alla'' at the beginning of the sentence then if they don't accept literal translation? It could have just been ''La ragazza non piace....'' and that's it!
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Lol, because that's not how Italian grammar works. You can't bend a language to suit your thinking. You have to bend your thinking to suit the language.
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Does anyone else do what I do - constantly? Think one thing in my head, and type a completely different word, or purely make a typing mistake because I'm typing too fast. Very annoying!
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alla ragazza= a + la + ragazza. Italian combines the preposition a with il, la, le, i, gli. the preposition a goes with the verb "to like", piacere. So the sentence would read "TO THE girl, juice is not pleasing" or "the juice is not pleasing TO THE girl". The combination of to + the=a+la=alla
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In this case, I believe the literal translation is "to the girl, juice is not pleasing" (or juice is not pleasing to the girl). the verb piace belongs to il succo.
because its the contraction, combining "to" and "the" so it reads "not pleasing to the girl." At least that is my understanding of it.
The sentence must sound natural. Thats why the literal translation is not accepted.
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Wouldn't the literal translation be "The juice is not pleasing to the girl" ? I understand that "The girl does not like the juice" is the more commonly accepted translation, but shouldn't a literal translation also be acceptable?
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Can anyone tell me, if someone said "La ragazza non piece il succo" when in Italy, would italians understand what we were on about?? Or would it sound like gobbledy-❤❤❤❤ making absolutely no sense?
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So would "Il succo non piace alla ragazza" work or is the original word order a rule?
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I get confused about when the article needs to be translated and when it doesn't. I wrote "the girl doesn't like juice" and it was marked wrong.
