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- "I teach English to my Japane…
"I teach English to my Japanese friends."
Translation:日本人の友達に英語を教えます。
77 Comments
I'm confused about the に in this situation if someone could shed some light?
1756
Here, it is marking the indirect object; the target (日本人の友だち) of an action (おしえる). To compare it with previous usage, in a sense, it is showing the direction or location of the action, much like "to" in English, e.g. go to vs. give to.
My teacher explained that in these cases に is marking who the action is being done to. Hope this helps. :)
As far as I understand it the "no" is being used to describe the type of friends. "What type of friends? The Japanese ones." It isn't describing two separate groups ("the friends" and "the Japanese people"). I am not sure how to write, "The friends of the Japanese people" though, so I can't help you there. Sorry!!! Hopefully this helped a little bit though.
の seems like a connector between an adjective and a noun. "Japanese" can be seen in this sentence as an adjective. Therefore, the friends are Japanese.
The point is, in many phrases before this one, in the same lesson, there was 日本の友達, without the 人. Correct also. So I find this mind-melting.
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As in most languages, it may be that there is more than one way to express more or less the same thing.
Sometimes you fail because you write kanji, other times you fail because you don't? Wow.....
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日本人の友達に英語を教えます。 -- Duo: "Wrong." Doesn't like the 達 and 教 characters.
So I went for the safe option of writing it completely in hiragana...
にほんじんのともだちにえいごをおしえます。 -- Duo: "Wrong."
Can't win. It almost always accepts sentences written completely in hiragana. So I assume there must be an alternate spelling such as にっぽんじん that it's looking for (or maybe the default is misspelt such as にほんひと or some other crazy thing). XD
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As you can see from the date underneath, it was over 2 years ago (April 2018) I wrote that reply to Miriam91979.
Back then the course was still on Tree 1.0 (the original version of the tree, which had only 40 skills). I completed Tree 1.0 almost a year earlier (May 2017) and always used the report feature very heavily. So I most likely already submitted a "my answer should be accepted" report for this sentence over three years ago now...
Further, as can be seen at the top of this sentence discussion, Duo's default Japanese translation for this sentence has since changed to "日本人の友達に英語を教えます", exactly the same as my first answer in that comment. So it's pretty obvious it accepts this answer now. But back when I wrote that comment, Duo's default Japanese translation was the following:
Btw, "whenever Duo rejects a correct answer, report" might not be entirely good advice. At least not in my situation where there were two rejected correct answers.
From what I've heard from course contributors, only the first report a user submits of each report type for each sentence actually gets received by the system. Even if it's a differently worded rejected answer, still only the first report of the "my answer should be accepted" type will work, unfortunately.
After the first one, any more won't actually go anywhere and will instead simply vanish into thin air as soon as you click submit. It's only once a contributor someday gets around to either accepting or rejecting the first report (of that type, from that user, for that sentence) that the system will finally once again be able to receive a new report (of that type, from that user, for that sentence).
Therefore, in my comment where I mentioned two correct answers that were rejected... If I had reported both rejected answers as "my answer should have been accepted", the second one would have been a complete waste of time. ^^;
(The first one would've probably been a waste of time too. Back when I wrote that comment was before Luke and Ehartz joined the contributor team. The original contributor team had seemingly mostly gone AWOL by that time, meaning it was very slow progress for reports to get processed back then. Therefore, I would've almost certainly had a "my answer should have been accepted" report for this sentence stuck in the system backlog already.)
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The hiragana of 日本 is にほん.Not にっぽん。人 means じん and ひと.じん is used in nationality and ひと is used in counting of people.
Exactly, this happened to me so many times already, It's really frustrating. This should be fixed, it's a real turn off sometimes and it's really confusing.
I think it's like the difference between "Japan friend" be "Japanese friend". The former sounds a bit weird.
Yet they teach the former in previous lessons (I call my Japanese friend on the phone). There does not seem to be consistency here.
And yet 日本の友だち is considered wrong in this one. Brillant, Duo. Just brillant.
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人 is people, so 日本 would just be Japan and 日本人 would be literally translated into "Japan people".
日本の友だち is then "friend in/from Japan", without specifying that they are in fact Japanese.
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i guess its trying to say my friend IN japan when they say 日本の友だち as in he is not japanese but lives in japan. while 日本人の友だち means my friend FROM japan, as in he is japanese.
Yes but I read in another comment that it is phrased weird and "nihonjin no tomodachi" is better. (Sorry! I dont have a Japanese keyboard on my phone yet!)
From my understanding no, 日本の友達 means Japan's friends ( as in the country of Japan ) whereas 日本人の友達 means Japanese friends ( your friends that are from Japan ).
How would one know when it's necessary? I see nouns combined without の quite frequently.
I am thinking that is better. I feel natural. But this is a feeling, sensation, impression. I can not say about grammar just now. I'm sorry, please let me change from "necessary" to "better".
You might be confusing nouns with adjectives? I think this rule works the same as in English, but with "(noun)'s", wherein you would say lucky paw, if lucky was an adjective, or Lucky's paw, with both Lucky and paw being nouns. I may be wrong, but I hope that helped.
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In my Japanese classes, we were told that you do need の to combine two different nouns. It's not necessarily a possessive although it could be in some cases. It's possible that some nouns might be compound nouns without the の but I'm not sure. It's best to put it in between nouns.
From my understanding の is a possessive marker, like the 's in John's dog. I'm no expert in Japanese so I might not be right.
I answered "nihonjin tomodachi" and got it incorrect. I didn't report it though, because I don't know if the "no" is necessary.
So why do we use 日本人の友だち here and 日本の友だち with the calling my Japanese friends? It is inconsistent in use. Plus I learned the latter when studying 30 years ago. Has the language changed that much?
I am afraid it's an inconsistancy issue with Duolingo. Yet I think both forms are not wrong. The latter sounds probably more natural.
As above, one is "Japanese-nationality friend", the other is "friend from/in Japan", who may or may not actually be Japanese.
Line breakdown: 日本人 - Japanese, 友だち（友達）- Friend(s), 日本人の友達 - (my) Japanese friend(s), に - to (particle), 英語 - English language, を - action particle, おしえます（教えます）- to teach.
The plural in Japanese is not mandatory. A noun can be singular or plural by itself. Also since 「友達」 already means either "friend" or "friends", i would guess it is more common to add 〜たち in this case if you want to make the plural explicit.
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Do you mean that "tomotachi" is an explicit form for the plural? And is there an expicit form for the singular?
友達 is the full kanji, たち is already present as the だち. This is a weird case where the usually-plural word is used for singular also; 友 can be used to mean singular "friend" on its own also, but this seems to be unusual (and is pronounced ゆう rather than とも)
Im not sure about this but i get the feeling that 'eigo' is the direct object of the verb to teach and would theoretically be marked with wo.
Correct. It's the same in English; "English" is the thing you're teaching, and "my Japanese friend" is the person you're teaching it to.
I think it has to do with what sounds more natural. Saying it your way would be "my friend's Japanese people" which is not what the sentence is stating.
I thought の is to express the connection between a possessor and it's possessed object! Why should it be between an adjective and the described noun! I am SO confused!
の indicates possessive. 私のシャツ - my shirt or used to connect nouns みどりいろのくつ - green shoes. 日本人 is a non not an adjective. It means Japanese person or people.
Duo translated 日本の友だち as Japanese friends and now it's different here. I am not clearly understanding the difference between this and 日本人の友だち though.
I had the same issue. I think it is inconsistency. Both are acceptable but I was taught the one without the 人 when I was a kid.
See above. "Japanese friend" in English implies Japanese nationality, which requires 日本人.
I Teach English To My Japanese Friends Should Be Right Not Using The Word Bank
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This exercise asks for a Japanese answer. If you typed that English sentence, it's obviously not going to get accepted. ^^;
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I really cannot stand the way the female computer voice says 英語. It sounds like she is saying a drawn out Eggo(as in the waffles).
i wrote 日本の友達に英語を教えます and it marked it wrong. Someone shed some light to it
OK, so as of today, May 14, 2020, it marked my "日本の友達に英語を教えます" as INCORRECT. Whereas, "日本の友達に電話をかけました" was marked CORRECT for "I called my Japanese friend".
Why? and, I think I will send a report.
also, "日本人の友達に電話をかけました" for "I called my Japanese friend" was marked INCORRECT the first time I typed it. ::Edit:: i just realized the first time, i actually put "日本語の友達に電話をかけました", which is definitely wrong.
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Im so proud I got that sentence right the first time I even saw it in this Lesson (I have "use keyboard" enabled all the time so I didnt have a word pool) ^^
I think duolingo does a great job overall.... they are gauranteef to make mistakes and its out job to help fix them. :]
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I'm confused about the term nihonjin in the setence. Shouldn't it be nihon no tomodachi?
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I think 日本の友だち means my friend IN Japan, may or may not be Japanese but just lives there. While 日本人の友だち means my friend who IS Japanese. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Could 日本人の友達 also mean "a Japanese person's friend"? Or would that be said a different way?
Surely if it's "friends" plural it would typically be 友達たち, but this was rejected...(given in other exercises where I've left out the 'たち' for a group of people, it was marked wrong).
Shouldn't it be 友だちたち or something? Isn't that how you make plurals of living people?
I believe へ only marks a general geographical direction, while に in this case is an indirect subject marker and can't be replaced.
