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- "小学生たち"
"小学生たち"
Translation:Elementary school students
57 Comments
Stand up isnt what tachi means in this context. Tachi refers to groups of people. But since there is no plural in japanese, it isnt required, it just helps to add more context.
So it would more accurately translate as: "A group of elementary students?" Could I use it to say 魚たち," a school of fish?
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In English a school of fish means a group of fish, nothing to do with a learning school. One of those strange collective nouns, like a murder of crows.
Here it means a plural suffix, like, an elementary school student ( 小学生 + tachi (たち)) = elementary school student(s), another simple example = 私(たち)は日本人です。 (We) are Japanese people.
Put in primary schoolers, primary school is the same as Elementary school. British English vs American English I guess.
We call it "grade school" in my region of the U.S. Officially, they're named elementary schools, but nobody actually calls them (or the students) that.
This is true, but it's a Japanese app made by Americans. Neither of those cultures use the term Primary School.
"Primary school" is still synonymous. I live in America and "primary" is used less but not diminished.
I live in America and when i was in school grades 1-3 were primary and 4-6 were elementary. But my friends five years younger than me called grades 1-6 elementary and never heard primary used by anyone but me. So I think it's partially a regional thing and partially a generational thing.
If you click/press on 小学生, it shows the in-context meaning of 小学生たち--"students".
I think Duolingo has been doing a good job showing contextual translations if you know where to look. Many of the other duolingo translations show stand alone and contextual translations of the same term depending on where you click. Read carefully!
I knew たち was a way to a pronoun plural but I didn't know you could use it to make nouns plural as well hmm.
Yup, be aware that they generally have to be nouns representing people (or animals) though, like 先生たち or アメリカ人たち are ok, but つくえたち is not (unless they actually cursed servants
Oops, the second half of my post got cut off because I put in a winky-face...
Interestingly, that means names are also something you can add たち to. If you say 田中たち, you are referring to "Tanaka's group" or "the group of people including Tanaka".
たち is supposedly cognate with Korean 들, for those interested in such connections.
Primary school pupils not accepted because it isn't the American way
When you click for the translation for Tachi, it says "stand up" instead of the plural.
Oh so it's just used to denote plural? I thought this might have been calling elementary students.
I've read that it isn't really a plural but is more like the phrase "and company".
So if you are talking about a group consisting of X, Y, and Z , you can refer to the group as X-tachi (as long as there is enough context to make it clear what you mean), meaning "X and company", and it doesn't necessarily mean "more than one X".
Hopefully someone will correct me if I have got this wrong.
Just adding to that, the ます form of 立つ ("to stand") is 立ちます tachimasu, hence why Duo has the tooltip there.
Why is nama pronounced as sei when i comes after gaku. Am i supposed to memorize this. Or is there a rule stating why?
You kind of just have to memorize it. I don't know why you learned it as nama in the first place; Duo has only used it in contexts where it is pronounced sei.
There is a set of rules, regarding on'yomi and kun'yomi, that describes how to choose which reading to use, but that only gets you so far since many kanji have multiple on'yomi or multiple kun'yomi. There are also a large number of exceptions to these rules. So you could spend your time memorizing all the common readings of kanji, the different rules for when to use which, the exceptions to those rules and their readings, but I would suggest simply memorizing the vocabulary, and learning the readings as you go.
The 中 has the audio なか earlier, I think perhaps because it is also used in 田中 たなか).
We were talking about 生, which can be pronounced なま, though it is pronounced せい in this exercise.
中 is indeed pronounced なか in 田中, but also, when the kanji is used on its own (i.e. not in combination with other kanji), it's also pronounced なか.
I was aware of what "we" were talking about, I simply wanted to cite another example of where the audio is mismatched in some cases.
The confusion arises when you're looking at 中国 and I think there was a "matching" exercise where the cards had 「中」 and 「ちゅう」... same problem.
Oh I see! My apologies; I didn't make that connection and my first assumption was that you had mixed up nama and naka.
But you're quite right; 中 (なか/ちゅう) is a kanji that causes quite a bit of confusion, and I wonder why the course developers chose to introduce it this way. Perhaps it was on purpose, to introduce beginners to the idea that kanji can have different pronunciation, but I personally feel it was too early and not particularly well done.
"Nama" isn't pronounced as "sei". It's just that the words "nama" and "sei" - as well as the suffix "-sei" that appears in the word "gakusei", for example - happen to all be written using the same character.
It's a bit like how the English words "entrance" (a way in) and "entrance" (to put into a trance) happen to be written using the same of string of characters, despite being different words with different origins.
Remember that language is speech. Writing systems are just tools for representing language on paper. And they don't always represent it in a very straightforward manner.
You need to memorise two separate facts: firstly, the fact that the word for "student" in Japanese is "gakusei", and then secondly, the fact that "gakusei" is written in kanji as 学生.
I've really been enjoying the Japanese course so far, but now suddenly it seems to be divulging into a mess of random, unexplained Kanjis that have me more often just guess the meaning instead of analytically deduce it, let alone giving me any type of handle on actually speaking it. This really needs more structure - if nothing else at least a comprehensive list of vocabulary introduced in every unit, featuring kanji with hiragana and, ideally audio of the pronunciation would be a good start.
There 'should' (sometimes it doesn't appear for me but reloading usually fixes this) be a magnifying glass button on each topic before you start the lesson. This will take you to a page which explains what the lesson will be teaching in more or less 'standard' textbook form.
The duo course appears to be concerned primarily with vocabulary at this stage, with an emphasis on listening (production is mostly of the 'type what you heard in japanese' which doesn't necessarily require full comprehension (or speaking) and 'translate isolated sentences to/from english' which doesn't necessarily require you understanding how to speak.)
The courses might benefit from furigana, but furigana is also a crutch for many second language learners, and can/would hinder kanji acquisition.
Wait as second tachi here makes the noun plural? I thought Japanese didn't have plurals? Is this a special case?
I believe it only works when relating to people or at least thats the only time ive heard it being used
Okay, so before I learn it wrong, when do you use たち？ Is it whenever after a noun, or is it only after a type of noun or something like that?
たち is generally used after animate objects, so nouns representing people or animals. Adding it to inanimate objects is typically not done, except for specific rhetorical effect, i.e. anthropomorphising the object.
I put elementary school student and it told me that was wrong just because of the missing s at the end of student(s)
That's because it is wrong. Having the "s" is the whole point of the exercise because Duo is trying to teach you plurals (たち).
In New Zealand, this group/age of schoolchildren are known as 'primary school students'. I had to look up 'elementary school' to check that the ages were the same.
The language used is very US-centric. In the Pacific region - i.e. NZ, Australia, Sāmoa, Fiji, Cook Islands etc. - we don't use the words in the quizzes to refer to schoolchildren.
We have primary schools, secondary schools (also known as high schools or colleges), and universities (rarely referred to as colleges, unlike in the States).
The 生 has a "nama" sound when i touch it to see what the symbol/letter means. But a "sei" sound when pronuonced in the sentence. Why is that?
Almost every kanji has more than one "reading" or pronunciation, and the correct reading depends entirely on the context the character is used in. There are a set of rules/guidelines regarding how to figure out which reading is correct, but they're quite complicated and have a lot of exceptions.
Suffice it to say that, when pronounced on its own, 生 is pronounced なま, but when paired with 学 in 学生, it's pronounced せい. Duolingo's TTS software isn't sophisticated enough to understand the context the kanji is in when you click it, so it pronounces it as if it was on its own.
My Chinese is very rusty, but yes I think they are quite similar. たち can apply to a wide range of nouns though, not just personal pronouns (if I'm remembering 们/們 correctly...)
小学 is specifically elementary school/primary school, the first 6 years of compulsory education
中学 would be middle/junior high school, the next 3 years of compulsory education
高校 is high school, the last 3 years of schooling which is optional (though in Japan over 90% of students attend).
All of these would be considered 'school students'. Though the phrasing "school kids" sounds strange to me, especially without the mention of which school.
