- Forum >
- Topic: Japanese >
- "このおちゃはからいですね。"
"このおちゃはからいですね。"
Translation:This tea is spicy, isn't it?
40 Comments
341
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.
904
it doesnt accept "right?" either, which is weird because that sounds even more natural than "isnt it?"
1345
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?
2188
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).
1720
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.