"Eher trinke ich Milch als Orangensaft."

[gewisse]

Without 'would' the English translation sounds wrong; it's really rare to use 'I rather' and not 'I would rather...' so I would translate it like you. If you wanted a more direct translation of 'I would rather', you could use 'Ich würde lieber...' or 'Ich möchte lieber...'

[Shiroryuu]

It is not rare in American English, + if I want to emphasize that I hate orange juice that much and I want to drink milk, than it is ok, to use "I rather drink".

[l1ghthousekeeper]

I agree with gewisse. As a native speaker, "I rather drink" sounds broken to my ears. Check out http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rather - the examples all use "I'd rather".

However, I'm mostly going by what I've heard in everyday speech. If anyone could provide a grammatical reason why this is incorrect, I would appreciate it.

[BB__]

In speech, it's probably totally fine to omit the "would" in "I would rather drink...", but I wouldn't do it in writing.

The only circumstance that "I rather..." is used in (that I can think of) is in a sentence like "I rather like that shade of blue", where "rather" means something more like "quite".

[jaye16]

Shiroyuu: So sorry but I'm Amer. and an Eng. teacher and I would never accept "I rather drink" Might it be some local slang. Still in no way is it correct.

[jaye16]

gewisse. Yes, yes you're right but how many times have we seen that Ger. is really different. And it's the first time I've seen this. Oh, did i get taken. i deserved to lose that heart.

[leontinus]

I heard "Er trinke ..." instead of "Eher trinke ..."

[BB__]

Same, but I figured that couldn't be right so I guessed that it was "eher". But that makes me wonder, can the two words be pronounced so similarly?

[georgewreid]

could you translate this as 'I would rather drink milk..." or is 'I would ... ' a differnt grammatical form?

[tholenst2]

One might argue that
"I rather drink milk than orange juice." = "Eher trinke ich Milch als Orangensaft."
is different from
"I would rather drink milk than orange juice." = "Ich würde eher Milch als Orangensaft trinken.

However, I think this would be overly strict, and I think one should equate all of the above.

[caiodce]

"Instead of Orange Juice" was also reported as wrong, even though contextually it's the same. Why?

[greenfire315]

I started it with rather I . . . but got it wrong.

[philster043]

In one question in this lesson, "eher.. als" (as in "Eher mag er Bücher lesen als Fehersehen" I think it was) was translated as "more than," so I went with "I drink milk more than orange juice" and it wasn't accepted here... could I get some help on understanding why?