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- "Oggi offro io la cena."
82 Comments
When you emphasize the fact that you, not somebody else pays. It's like "It is me who pays for dinner today" in English.
Actually, in English we would say "*I* am paying for dinner tonight". Putting the pronoun after the verb just puts the emphasis on "I".
Correction (Sorry! I was an English teacher): "It is I (not me) who pays for dinner today." Me is the objective case, whereas you want the nominative case here.
Of course It is I is correct in English, but no longer used in conversation. People say "It's me." Since many people here are foreigners--teaching them to say "It is I" in English is essentially teaching an archaic or at least literary form. Easily avoided by saying I'll pay for dinner today. (FWIW I have an MA in English Lit, native speaker of American English.)
Being a native English speaker, from England, yes all the time we say "it is me" but grammatically it is wrong, one should say "It is I".
Let's just all chip in so that we can say "It's we!" Now that does not sound weird at all. :)
I translated "cena" as "supper". This answer was rejected. One kind of problem with such an arbitrary rejection is that English does not make any strong distinction between the two words. Similarly, Italian in the north uses "cena" for dinner but in the south uses "pranzo". A second kind of problem is that there are famous examples where "cena" is traditionally translated as supper. For example, the religious event known in English as "the Last Supper" in Italian is "l'Ultima Cena".
Grazie. Very helpful. I am a native speaker and can vouch for the fact that we use "supper" and "dinner" interchangeably in the US, though dinner is somewhat more common.
Yes, although there are regional differences. In some places, "dinner" is more formal and/or at midday; "supper" is the common evening meal.
My understanding is that "dinner" is the main meal of the day, regardless of what time of day it is taken, and "supper" is always an evening meal, whether or not it is the main meal of the day.
1303
I think of "dinner" as something fancy, usually at the evening meal, and often something you go out to a fancy restaurant for. Usually it's "supper" at home though (nothing fancy!) I know this varies by where you live (I'm in Toronto, Canada and I'm sure other people who live here would say something different in any case.)
In the UK, or where I'm from at least, it's lunch at midday and tea in the evening. I'd agree with you that 'dinner' sounds quite fancy, and I would say that 'supper' feels a bit old-fashioned
That's The Difference I'm Most Familiar With, I've Often Times Hear My Grandparents Atleast Saying "Dinner" In Reference To A Large Meal Eaten Around Midday. I'd Say "Dinner" Is The Largest Meal Of The Day, While "Supper" Is The Last, They're Oftentimes, But Not Always, The Same.
It might help to think, "dinner/to dine" and "supper/to sup," or take soup, usually ground up and liquified left-overs.
I think the use of supper is a regionalism in the US. In California we don't say let's have supper really ever. We have lunch at midday and dinner. Apparently there are parts of the US where people use the word supper instead of dinner.
I think it can vary by region and maybe by culture. When I was growing up on the east coast, we never ate 'supper' - we ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I had always assumed supper was the same as dinner. But then I spent a summer on a family farm in Ohio, where the largest meal of the day was at noon and it was called 'dinner', then there was lighter meal called 'supper' at the end of the day.
I agree the words are interchangeable in the UK. Foreigners should also know that there's a lot confusion and snobbery about the words we English use for meals. Today I think "supper" is the posh word for the evening meal and "lunch" to a slightly lesser degree for the midday meal. The working class word for the evening meal can be either "dinner" or perhaps more often "tea". The English class system tears itself apart about these words, beware!
all very true gordon. I'm a working class by origin northerner (wouldn't like to say what I am these days) - as a kid "dinner" was lunchtime, "tea" as you say evening meal taken pretty early - factories let out relatively early, none of this working late in the office or presenteeism or the Italian habit of eating the evening meal very late (to my Brit stomach). Hence "tea-time". Contrary to the post above, I wouldn't say "supper" and "dinner" were totally interchangeable. When I was a kid supper was an odd extra snack late evening just before going to bed! I remember one northerner on the radio expressing his surprise on being invited to "supper" by some metropolitan types. Half joking he asked if they wanted him to come round in his pajamas!
- 150
Thanks Silk Warrior for triggering some memories. I'm an Australian who had a few English grandparents. We used eat with my surviving grandmother on Friday nights, probably around 6.00pm. In those days, we called this meal 'tea'. These days, most Australian would call any evening meal 'dinner'. Later in the evening, my Grandma would make supper, perhaps around 8.30 or 9.00pm, which usually consisted of cups of tea with cake or biscuits (sweet, but sometimes savoury, that is, with cheese and pickled onions!). I know supper means dinner in some USA states thanks to all the US TV shows I watched as a child. No Australian I know uses supper in this way.
Yes, in the UK, even to this present day there seems to be a class/cultural divide over the label that we attach to our meals. How about this for a different one; my father was working class from the Midlands and he always called his lunchtime sandwiches at work 'snap'. What would the Italian language make of that?
- 1303
This is all very interesting. As I just posted to a comment above, I think of "supper" as the ordinary thing and "dinner" as the fancy-schmancy one. And for us, tea is just the drink tea (with maybe a snack along with it, at least in my family - and then there are those who don't drink tea at all - imagine that!) I'm sure that this varies a great deal depending on where you live and on social class. I'm Canadian but my family's origins are English and Irish and not posh.
Huh, Interesting, I Might Use "Tea" To Refer To A Smaller Snack Around 17-18 O' Clock, While "Dinner" Or "Supper" Would Be At 20 Or So, Sometimes Even Later.
I have spent months in Italy, in Perugia and north of Milan and both regions call yet midday meal pranzo and the evening meal cena.
Did you report that your answer shoukd be correct? Personally, I would not use the word supper, but thst is bery regional in the United States. Duolingo can't pick up,those variations without people reporting them.
- 578
To all the discussion above: the words supper, tea, dinner, et al were very regional until people became more mobile -- and brought their cultures and vocabulary with them. Here in California, for example, you only heard the word 'supper' in books. It was not until I had a new neighbor from Boston who thought supper was the evening meal. The thing to remember is that Duolingo is only a software program. It can't distinguish between regional/cultural preferences. It is based only on whoever wrote the software.
[QUESTION]
Sorry, I just want to make sure that I'm on the right track. Which one is correct and more common, "L'Ultima Cena" or "La Cena Ultima"?
Grazie mille.
This is a very confusing sentence. I knew what all the words meant but still couldn't make any sense of it.
- 196
I hope this might make it easier. In English we also have this same word order: "Says who? "Say I" "Said he" "And so say all of us." "Toiling away up the slope I was." This last, to bring forward the scene and action.
So "Offer I the dinner." in Italian is not so strange. It is we (not 'us'), speakers of English, who have been gradually dropping some things for the sake of debatable 'simplicity' or some teachers probably largely in the US moved things that way -into rigid rules at the expense of language appreciation and other features.
In the end we are embracing and appreciating Italian.
well, I like peter's translation just above. It seems quite close to the Italian sentence, except for the English idiomatic part 'it is on me' which means 'you don't have to pay for it; I'll take care of it.'
oggi offro io la cena
today I offer dinner
today dinner is on me
agreed, same for me. In fact there's another exercise where a person "offro vino" and the correct answer is "serve wine" so why is not correct here?
Agree, I saw the sentence with "serve wine" and chosen it as a better fitting option, but it is not accepted.
- 1812
Zdarec Michale, "SERVE wine" is in italian always "SERVIRE il vino" and "OFFER wine" is always "OFFRIRE il vino", so if you could go back to that frase (I don't know where it could be) and let the duolingo team know their mistake, it would be great for the future users. Diky moc.
A previous example in this same lesson with this verb had it translated as "to serve": Lui offre del vino alle donne: He serves wine to the women. I entered "Today I serve dinner" and it was incorrect. Can someone please explain a. why it is translated as serve and not offer in the first example, and vice versa in this one; and b. how would you say "Today I serve dinner"?
It would be difficult to guess the meaning (I'm paying for dinner today) just from knowing the meanings of the individual words. (I put "Today i give the dinner" thinking it meant I'm cooking dinner for everyone. Maybe duolingo believes we will remember better something like this if we get it wrong the first time, as we are very likely to do, if a particular idiom has not been introduced before we are asked to translate it. I suspect it does make it more memorable.
My Italian teacher told us it's a bit idiomatic for someone to say "Offro io" to say that they're picking up the check. I think DL is exposing us to the phrase for this reason.
- 1506
"today I'm paying for dinner" not accepted 18 Mar 2018. Reported.
Ordinarily, I try not to use English continuous tenses, but in this particular case, where you want to translate the emphatic nature of the Italian as well as it's linguistic meaning, present continuous should be the preferred translation, because the English idiom places the same sort of emphasis on the sentence as does the inclusion of io after offro in the Italian.
Present continuous, like Italian state + gerunds, focuses in much more on the very present moment that something is happening, connoting an exclusion of other actions. Also, use of the contraction "I'm paying" instead of "I am paying" shifts the focus onto "paying", as if the sentence actually read I (am) PAYING.
The English idiom of the contracted auxiliary + continuous tense is the most accurate way of translating offro io, and should be accepted.
- 1506
On returning to this exercise, I tried "Today
Duo marked it wrong and told me the correct answer is "Today i'll pay for the dinner." That is NOT better than "I'm/I am paying".
- 116
Couldn't it also be "Today I invite dinner"? I know both sentences aren't exactly the same, but i believe one of the various interpretations for both is a shared one.
So "offro io la cena" means that "I offer the dinner" but then how do you offer it TO somebody - say, "I offer myself the dinner" or "I offer you the dinner" ? Grazie!
- 2537
I put, "Today I treat for dinner." I am familiar with offro io being a way of offering to pay. For us, "to treat" is a way of offering to pay or to buy.
Could someone please explain the placement of the verb and pronoun in this sentence?
Why is it 'Oggi offro io la cena' rather than 'Oggi io offro la cena'. Is it for emphasis?
This threw me off because I couldn't make sense of the grammar. This was presented as multiple choice: "Oggi ---- io la cena." with a choice between "offro" and "offri". I read it as "Today ---- I the dinner." So I guessed that maybe 'io' could sometimes mean 'me', and chose 'offri' to make the sentence mean "Today you offer me the dinner." My answer was rejected.
There was no explanation given for the corrected answer. Nothing in the notes. Is this a common grammatical construct? Is it an idiom? How can I use this? Can I say "Oggi offri tu la cena." to mean "Today dinner is on you."? How about "Oggi offre il restaurante le beverande." for "Today drinks are on the house."?
Again, the emphasis is on the subject when the Italians switch the order. If you were just conjugating, you would say "io offro" but when you are trying to emphasize that YOU are doing the offering (i.e., offering to pay), you switch to offro IO.
Thanks. I am mostly just blowing off some steam. When it comes to deriving grammar from examples, I can be a bit obtuse. With Duolingo's Spanish course, having a good beginner's Spanish book helped a lot with the grammar. I guess it's time to find one for Italian too.
I agonized over this translation, until I realized how unlikely I am to ever make that statement (offer to pay for dinner). Sorry, a little levity.
I wrote "Today I give the dinner", which is correct in English, at least where I come from, and is one of the suggested meanings of "offro" I was marked incorrect, with the correct answer given as "Today I offer the dinner". It is only because I came here to post a comment that I see the preferred translation is "Today dinner is on me".
I too wrote "Today I give the dinner", but with the idea of a more formal occasion than a simple treat, and to me this still seems reasonable.
My translation "Today I pay for the dinner" was rejected and replaced with "Today I'll pay for the dinner". Why????
In English you need to use the future (will pay) or the present progressive (am paying). I pay is present tense and is not correct (I am a native English speaker). Also, it would be more colloquial in English to leave out the "the" before dinner. So--Today I'll pay for dinner is most correct.
- 259
Why do they insist on such specific phrases? Have run through every alternative turn of phrase (in English) I could think of. This isn't a course in language, it is a course in Duolingo.
Haven't we had this verb to mean serve before (the waiter serving wine to the women). Didn't work that way for the dinner though
- 193
I translated it as "Today I offer to pay for dinner." Not sure why that is significantly different than the DL solution of "Today I will pay for dinner." Any thoughts? Or would my answer more correctly be "Oggi offro pagare la cena." Any thoughts?
Since offrire was also used as "to serve", why cannot a correct solution be?: Today I serve the dinner. (of course with emphasis on "io" because it follows the verb)
- 193
William, my Webster's New World Italian Dictionary defines 'offrire' as 'to offer' and does not list 'to serve' (servire) as an alternate definition. I would agree that these could possibly be synonyms in the correct context. But for this lesson, I see a difference between offering to pay for one's dinner, and serving it.
- 1078
I answered "today I am buying dinner" as that is the way I would explain it to make clear that I am the one paying (as opposed to "today I am cooking dinner (for you)" and Duolingo marked it wrong. "Dinner is on me" is much more idiomatic English and Duolingo can be very inconsistent about whether it wants more literal translations (which I usually use as it makes me think more about the different ways I could think about it in English, hoping to get myself thinking more like an Italian) or idiomatic ones. :-[
- 1078
I looked back. I tried "today I will buy" and "today I buy" but not "today I am buying"....
- 218
Dinner is on me, I'll buy you dinner, I'll get your dinner, I'll shout you dinner (Australian!) - all different ways of saying it. But why does Duo not accept the literal translation as well? "Today I offer you dinner" should be accepted.
I Hadn't Seen This Sentence Before, And Had To Pick Which Word Goes Between "Oggi" And "Io", I Interpreted It As "The Day Offers Me The Dinner" (Doesn't Really Make Sense, Atleast Not With "Dinner", But Duolingo Has Used Nonsensical Sentences In The Past), I'm Quite Annoyed That I Was Marked Wrong With No Possible Way Of Knowing That It's Offro. I'm Guessing The Way I Used It Would Have "Mi" Instead Of "Io", But I'd Never Seen The Verb Before The Pronoun Before, So It Made Just As Much Sense To Me.
- 1435
Whereas it is perfectly common, the phrase "[whatever] is on me" is somewhat informal. I tried – in search of an emphasis on "I" – "Today, I pay for dinner", and "Today, it is I who pays for dinner", neither of which was accepted. Whereas, of course, one would normally say something completely different: "You must let me pay for dinner today". The last time I heard the phrase "such-and-such is on me" an eight-year-old cowboy was trying to buy the friendship of some other children by giving away bars of white chocolate.
Since I had no idea what this Italian sentence meant I put "Today I offer the dinner" and it was accepted! It's not even meaningful English.
