"ほかの学生のテストを見てはいけません。"
Translation:You may not look at another student's test.
86 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
I agree that those are also perfectly fine translations to deny someone permission to do something, but why would I try something different if my answer was accepted?
Not necessarily. Depending on tone, "may not" can convey a formal imperative. It's something I remember teachers saying.
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This. You can't say "You can not see" in this context. Notably you also can't say "You can not look" UNLESS you have "at."
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I think you didn't quite get the gist of this sentence. Here, 'cannot' means 'must not', not 'unable to'. It's irrelevant whether the tests are invisible or not.
学生（がくせい） refers to university students, and 生徒（せいと）refers to students in compulsory education. This is something that used to confuse me because I learned that gakusei = student, and I would incorrectly call junior high school students "gakusei".
So 学生 is student and 生徒 is pupil? That makes a lot of sense. Does that then mean that all those sentences about being an elementary school student (which I always found odd) are incorrect?
I'm not sure what sentences you're referring to, but you usually call an elementary school student 児童 (jidou) or 小学生 (shougakusei) (生徒 seito seems to only be used in specific circumstances). 学生 (gakusei) by itself in general shouldn't be used for someone who isn't in university.
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That wasn't the case when I lived in Japan as an English teacher at a high school (JET Programme). It was ~25 years ago, but we definitely referred to the students as 学生たち.
Are you sure you didn't say 小学生たち or 中学生たち? I was corrected for calling junior high school students 学生 (~2011). As a classification (for example on a form where you have to list your job), any student can be classified as 学生, but to do so in a specific school setting is unusual. See: https://chigai-allguide.com/%E5%85%90%E7%AB%A5%E3%81%A8%E7%94%9F%E5%BE%92%E3%81%A8%E5%AD%A6%E7%94%9F/
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Considering I was teaching in a high school, I can be certain that we never used 小 or 中. I should note that I meant that this was while in conversation with the other staff members, and not speaking of the students in any other setting.
Interesting. Maybe because high school is not compulsory education, some people call high school students 学生 instead of 生徒 even though it's not the most correct word.
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The required answer 'you can not look...' is incorrect English. Of course you CAN look (which means able to look). What they mean is you must not look, which was not accepted. Reported.
In the context here, the implication of not being allowed to do it is still present when using cannot. Being a curmudgeon about language doesn't change the fact that it's still said this way
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Curmudgeon or not, my point was that "must not look" (or "may not look"), which is actually more correct than "cannot look", was not accepted and should have been
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Absolutely. Unfortunately, many native English speakers don't even differentiate between "can" and "may" nowadays.
Which is why it's pointless to cling to outdated 'rules'. Can is widely used to talk about permission and dictionaries list that usage, there's nothing wrong with it whatsoever.
English students read these comments too, so this kind of thing is confusing at best and actively misleading at worst! Please don't
Can anyone explain how the は particule works in this sentence? It's not part of the verb, is it?
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は is working like it usually does: as a topic marker. ほかの学生のテストを見を見て is a phrase describing an action (to look at another student's test), and that action is the topic of the sentence.
To add to this, this sentence can be read as: "As for looking at other students' tests, you cannot do it." where everything before the comma is the topic.
Even simpler with a gerund: Looking at other students' replies is a no-no. Too colloquial, I know.
It's been 1 year and this isn't accepted, at least for the listening exercise. Not sure why I even bother with them anymore.
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English should read "students' tests" because it is posessive. The translation I saw was missing the apostrophe and said I had a typo for putting it in. There are multiple tests of multiple students at which you must not look, so proper grammar requires the s' ending.
I think this is a problem with the duolingo programming, I've encountered an apostrophe at the end of a word being marked as a spelling mistake in other courses as well.
[Edit: 7/25/2018 it seems the problem has been fixed.]
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According to the hints, いけません can be translated as any of "may not", "must not" or "should not". Of course, in English, these three phrases have slight differences. Which is closest to the actual meaning of いけません? Examples: May not - I am denying your request Must not - You are forbidden to do something and/or doing so would have negative consequences Should not - It is advisable not to do something
it's sort of all of the above, depending on context. usually, it means "must not" and/or "may not" as you define it, but i've heard it used in all three ways.
if you want to be clear that your intent is "should not," you can say something like "しないほうがいい" literally meaning "it's better if you don't do [that]"
This was a very educational sentence. I wish Duolingo had the feature to hide those answer words, because that would have made it more difficult. Now I could pretty much guess from the words what the answer was supposed to be.
you can change the settings so that you have to type the answer instead of selecting the words. i believe by clicking the keyboard icon
Umm...It was red with an X, and I got it wrong, yet it still said: 'Nicely done. Meaning: you may not look at another student's test.' Noticed the nicely done part even though I got it wrong.
In 2021,the answer "you cannot look at another students test" wasnt accepted.
Duolingo doesn't mark answer for punctuation like periods and question marks, but it marks you wrong for misusing apostrophes. It should be "student's" with an apostrophe, and just "students" would be wrong.
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Should be accepted, report it next time. Although "may not" is the technically correct phrase, "cannot" is more often used.
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What's wrong with "looking at another student's test is not allowed"? Aside from it being very literal, and Duolingo rejecting it, I mean.
It more or less means the same thing, though you'd want " students' ". I think your translation sounds a little less formal than the Japanese as it is not a command.
This time I wrote: "You cannot look at another student's exam" and it was still wrong... Reported. Unless there is a rule when you can interchange "exam" and "test" and when you cannot?
I think you were right to report. Some might say that テスト is test and 試験 (shiken) is exam, but "test" and "exam" are often used as interchangeable synonyms in English.
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I'm just happy to see a school question from the teacher's perspective instead of the students'. I haven't been in fourth grade for 36 years.
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Heh. Yeah, thinking about it, a lot of these seem to be from the teacher's perspective. Gives some good representation. :)
Is "You are not allowed look at another's test” wrongly translated? I thought "はいけません" might mean that as well, but maybe it's something a bit different?
Thanks for the reply. Yeah you might be right maybe I was missing the word "student" on that attempt and that's why it was wrong. But then, does "はいけません" also means "You are not allowed"?
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As was explained in the Tips section, when a verb (for example, "suru"/"shi masu" which means "do") is written in this way (for example, "shite wa ike masen") it means "you must not." It's a prohibition.
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That should be OK. I don't know if it's in the list of acceptable answers for this exercise, though.
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This was marked wrong: 他の学生のテストを見てはいけません I don't see a difference besides hoka in kanji. Does anyone else?
Your answer is correct. I recommend reporting that, Duolingo is weird about kanji a lot of the time.
I do report them but it doesn't help. People report things and months later nothing has changed.
Another or any other. Is there a difference? How would the latter be written?
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Well, even in English "another" is a compound word ("an other.") If you're asking about how to say "another" vs "any other" in Japanese, I believe that would be somewhat context-dependent. I'm sorry, but right now I'm drawing a bit of a blank for how to phrase these distinctions clearly in Japanese. "Hoka no" would probably be "another" whereas "any other" stresses "any," so that might be expressed more by intensifying "may not" into something more like "absolutely may not," such as by adding "zettai." Like, "It is absolutely not allowed."
Sorry this explanation is such a mess. It'd be appreciated if another user could expound on it to clean it up.
Should it accept consult instead of look at. I English look at and consult in this context mean essentially the sane thing.
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Kyle800490 is correct.
見る: to see, to look, to watch, to view, to observe.
Consult has a similar connotation in English, but is not the same thing and is also a different word in Japanese, 「参照し」【さんしょうし】