"このおちゃはからいですね。"
Translation:This tea is spicy, isn't it?
41 Comments
"This tea is spicy is it not" is equivalent to "This tea is spicy isn't it", yet it is wrong
108
The ね is not exactly equal to "isn't it?" Instead, it's a sound used when the speaker thinks the listener will agree with the sentence. So it's like the italian "no?" at the end of an Italian sentence, or a USian saying "right?". The Japanese course creators have decided to translate ね as "isn't it?", so even though your answer is technically the same, it's not accepted as correct.
And as a USian, if I heard someone saying "is it not?" I would be certain that they were not a native English speaker.
Regional dialects, I have used that expression on occasion in that context. And yes, I am a native english speaker.
- 325
it doesnt accept "right?" either, which is weird because that sounds even more natural than "isnt it?"
My brain paused for a minute on what does 'USian' means. (facepalm) Sorry Americans. You became USian now :)
- 749
I always thought "ね" was more of an agreement seeker which means it could mean "…isn't it?" but also ",yes". As in, "This green tea is spicy, yes?" A lot of people use "yes?" as an agreement seeker. But this marks it as wrong.
I'm not sure I understand why "This tea is salty isn't it?" would be the answer. からい is supposed to mean spicy isn't it? So why would it translate as it being salty?
- 1605
It seems the word からい originally meant "salty" and later developed the sense "spicy". (Or, perhaps, it meant "spicy" in a sense which encompassed "salty", with saltiness being the most commonly salient kind of spiciness? But I'm speculating here.) New words came into use with the specific meaning of "salty" (しおからい (literally "salt-spicy") & しょっぱい) and these days からい has the basic meaning "spicy". However it is still sometimes used to mean "salty" (perhaps more commonly in some regional dialects than in standard Japanese).
It has two different versions: if you use a wrong word (like me: "hot"), it indeed answers "This tea is salty, isn't it?" - which makes little sense. But here in the comments section it gives the right answer as "This tea is spicy, isn't it?"
- 1123
I think words like ね and よ are quite hard to be translated into English, so I'll probably ignore them when translating in Duolingo. Most of the time it passes, but this time it fails.
On Duo, "Spicy" (辛い) is sometimes pronounced "Karai" and sometimes "Tsurai" (which I think means "Difficult"). Is this deliberate, to stress that something it's so spicy that it's difficult to eat, or is it just that the system picks up a random audio sample that matches that Kanji?
I don't know about Japanese, but in other langages 'hot' isn't another way of saying spicy.
afaik, there are different types of spicy. Ginger, cinnamon, horseradish, peppercorns, and capsicum are all things I would consider spicy (or hot), but are different.
It doesn't accept the answer "this GREEN tea is spicy, isn't it?" which is kinda confusing to me because I learnt that おちゃ is supposed to be green tea... isn't it? But then again, I don't understand how green tea can be spicy.
ね gives me the feeling that it more like an emphasis on emotion rather than a question. It more likes "what a spicy tea!" and doesn't expect a former answer. So I may reply "そうですね” which if it means "that's right, isn't it" then it will become an infinite question loop =^=
