"よるはさむいです。"
Translation:It is cold at night.
28 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
how I understand it, よる is night in general, meaning every night, not only tonight which would be こんばん
To put it simply, the issue here is the murrican way of having "night" be interchangable with "evening". Here's the short of it from another one of my posts below:
Morning->noon->afternoon->evening->night
朝→午→昼過ぎ→晩→夜
I put "It is a cold night" and it was marked wrong. I'm curious if these translations are also correction or not.
I think it's marked wrong because "a" implies this night; i.e. a specific night. Whereas this is saying that nights, in general, are cold? Possibly :-\
I thought the same thing. But there were not many word choices. So I ended up with "Night is cold". Sounds unnatural, but I got it right!!
I think "Nights are cold" should be perfectly acceptable.
182
I answered "nights are cold"...which I think is still correct since there is no plural form of words in Japanese. Does anyone have an idea why I was wrong?
- 1893
I am wondering this too but Duo doesn't like it when I comment, they just disappear into the aether.
That is true, but at this point duolingo uses ごんばん exclusively for "evening", later on it will introduce 夕べ 「ゆうべ」but before it is taught it will not accept either form as an answer for evening.
No, duolingo, this is wrong. 夜は寒いです means "the night is cold" or "The nights are cold", if you want to say "it is cold at night", you say 夜に寒いです or 夜で寒いです if you want to be less specific.
It depends on context. EDIT: 夕べ (ゆうべ) is the general word, 今晩( こんばん ) is this (or last) evening
- 1741
Above, Robi asked "can i say evening instead of night as the translation and you said no. But then you say that よる means evening.
My Japanese dictionary also defines よる as "evening/night".
Therefore I dont see why "Evenings are cold" or "Evening is cold" is not an acceptable translation for "よるはさむいです"
Please can you explain? I keep getting it wrong and it is frustrating. If my answer is valid I will report it, but if it's wrong I want to properly understand why.
Thanks!
Hi, sorry for the late reply, the problem is with english language, specifically the american english one, where "night" can mean "evening", which is less than helpful when learning the words for night and evening respectively. 夜(よる) is explicitly night-time, and this confused me as well in the above post, which in turn is why i did sperg about it elsewhere, only to get confused in it myself.
夕べ (ゆうべ) is the actual word for evening. I have fixed the above post as well, thank you for noting about this.
Addendum: There's also 晩(ばん) which is mostly encountered as parts of words, such as evening meal (aka. dinner) 晩ご飯( ばんごはん ) and the previously mentioned "this evening". As far as i have understood from asking people, it's more leaning toward the general time of the evening as opposed to "it is evening", but the nuance is the devil in the details in JP.
Extra ninja edit: While i didn't catch a native, i caught a N1 japanese speaker, this is their take: 晩 can mean night, but is mostly used to mean evening. Generally refers to the evening as a whole, including when the sun recently has set and it's still twilight. 夕方 is from when the sun is setting until there’s no more light 夕べ is almost entirely interchangeable with the above, some dialects choose not to use it to mean "evening" in general, but rather "last night". 夜 is explicitly after dark, which would be "night".
- 1273
Shouldn't "あつく" also be acceptable? I mean, it can hardly be hot and cold at the same time, can it?
