13 Comments
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...'
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".
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.
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".
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.
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.
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?
could you translate this as 'I would rather drink milk..." or is 'I would ... ' a differnt grammatical form?
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.
"Instead of Orange Juice" was also reported as wrong, even though contextually it's the same. Why?
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?
