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- "かのじょはだれですか？"
"かのじょはだれですか？"
Translation:Who is she?
29 Comments
If the question was about who is your girfriend it would never come up at random, meaning it would have to be used in a specific context, moreover said to an individual, more like "あなたの彼女は？ or ボオブさん彼女はどなたですか？ which means either "when it comes to your girlfriend...? (question implied) / is this your girlfriend" or "Bob's girlfriend who is" becauase "you" in japanese is rarely used as it is considered quite impolite....so no the question cannot be interpreted as "who is your girlfirend"
You show me a new word, so I click it to see the translation. It literally says "she" and "girlfriend". But of course, only "she" is accepted.
No big deal. I need a ton of practice and don't mind repetition. But. It's just an annoying system. Really, really annoying...
It's not the end of the world, duolingo is really just to break the ice for more formal study like textbooks... yay
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Yeah. This will just help learn some words and grammar. All of the context stuff will be hard. I think it will be beneficial to have a bit of background before jumping into that more fully
I have been using Genki 1: An integrated course in Elementary Japanese so far. Im not aware if theres better ones for people who are fairly new
The difficulty in Japanese is that many words have multiple meanings and many kanji have multiple readings... There's a lot of context clues involved in figuring out meanings.
the thing is, in duolingo sentences there is NO context. how would you know what the people putting this course together had in mind, if they don't accept multiple correct solutions?
Agreed. I would actually be interested in paying for Duolingo if they provided proper educational notes on new word as they were introduced, and how they should be used. Just having that dumb owl pop in every so often to tell me I'm learning a lot is nothing. I don't feel like I'm really learning anything here, just memorising things.
Words can mean different things based on context. The popup shows all meanings including ones which are invalid in the current sentence. The popups are just hints. There's a good comment higher up which explains why this can't be read as girlfriend here.
Annoying thing is the question does not state the position of the person, as in "who is this woman" or "who is that woman". I think both translations should be accepted as correct.
彼女(かのじょ) is “she” (when it’s not “girlfriend”). “who is this/that woman” should be この/あの女の人は誰ですか if I’m not mistaken.
Yes, in literall translation that would make sense but I'm not sure if that is actually ever used as I have never heard that...誰 is quite rude in general so in case you really have to ask who I guess you'd use 何方 （どなた), am I right?
Is it more common to use the hiragana form だれ or the kanji 誰? I'm curious about this, because it seems duo is quite inconsequent when it comes to when and how kanji is used.
This has confused me on a few exercises but why are some symbols tiny? E.g. the one for girl? (I'm guessing it's for different meanings, but there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it)
Are you talking about the ょ in かのじょ? It basically means that this Kana should not be read with its full pronunciation (in this case “yo”) but combines with the letter before or after (in this case before) to a single syllable. By far the most common uses of such small Kana are these two:
- A small kana from the y- series (やよゆ) following a regular-size Kana whose pronunciation ends in -i. This means the -i is deleted and the two combine to a single syllable. So for example みょ is pronounced “myo” (contrast this with full-size みよ “miyo”). This is also the way to write syllables with initial sh- or j- and a vowel other than i: しゃ sha, じょ jo etc.
- A small っ simply means that the following consonant is doubled. So where かた is be read “kata”, かった is “katta”.
(I used Hiragana for the examples but obviously the exact same rules hold for Katakana.)
It's not completely obvious, ad Katakana has small vowels; allowing for sounds like ti ティ and fe フェ.
