"Alla ragazza non piace il succo."
Translation:The girl does not like the juice.
77 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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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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!
I'm not sure why people are lobbying for "To the girl, the juice is not pleasing. " Yes, Alla ragazza literally translates to "To the girl" but the literal translation of non piace is "doesn't like". It is a verb. 'Pleasing' is an adj complement in English ( in Italian 'piacevole') so technically the literal translation is "To the girl doesn't like the juice" so I'm not sure why people are saying "To the girl, juice is not pleasing" is the literal translation. Also, let's be honest. How many people in English would say "To the girl, the juice is not pleasing"?
Thanks for the explanation. Duo leaves us confused, guessing or looking elsewhere for assistance with grammar since instruction is never provided. Had I realized the need for and availability of numerous resources (Including this forum) on the web I would have saved myself a lot of time and frustration when I began.
Duo is inconsistent with the literal vs common usage translations.
I just responded with, "The girl's shoes are black," which was marked wrong with the correct answer provided as, "The shoes of the girls are black."
I realize another possible response would be "The girls' shoes..."
How much worse this must be for those who are non native English speaker!
I keep telling myself that I shouldn't complain when it's free.
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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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Duo, it is unanimous: Duo must begin accepting the literal translation to help the Beginner learning process!
Ok, here's my take on this. Normally in English we would say, the girl does not like juice. If we say, the girl does not like the juice, that means something different. I think we are trying to learn a sentence that means, The girl does not like juice, because that is a much more common idea we would say. I don't like apples rather than i don't like the apples. He doesn't like horses, rather than, he doesn't like the horses.
When we are learning a language we tend to think of what we want to say first in English. We should learn to equate our natural way of expression with the way Italians say the same thing in their natural way.
As we learn the Italian grammar and understand it, we don't need a literal translation of the Italian sentence. We can understand it easily enough. And because the way we learn from very simple grammar to more complex, i think we can easily grasp what we need to about the Italian without resorting to silly literal translations.
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I'm thankful that French is my native tongue, because honestly, the structure of Italian wordings and phrases is coming to me naturally due to French. I can only imagine how confusing it may be for other people. All roman language speakers have an ease and extra advantage when it comes to learning another roman language. French, Spanish, Italian, romanian, Portuguese.