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- "今年はよくラーメンを食べました。"
"今年はよくラーメンを食べました。"
Translation:I often ate ramen this year.
68 Comments
499
When the suggested translation is rejected, it's a technical glitch, as opposed to a missing translation.
Apparently what one can do is submit a bug report so Duolingo's technical staff can deal with it: . It's best to include a screenshot.
Yeah I had the same answer and DL said "Nope, correct answer is 'He ate a lot of ramen this year'" which makes no sense since there is no "he" implied and thus "I" should be implied or at the very least not rejected.
Only explanation is that the translation database has more holes than Swiss cheese. Literally speaking I suppose ました should translate to "I ate" rather than "I have eaten", but since we are talking about the current year, which by definition isn't over yet, "I have eaten..." seems the most logical English translation with an implied "...thus far." omitted at the end.
When you look back on a year, you usually use past tense, right? You don't say, "I have a lot of great trips" on New Year's Day. You say "I had a lot of great trips" to reminisce on that specific year. If you use present perfect, this is the new sentence: 今年はよくラーメンを食べます、which doesn't have a very smooth English translation: this year, I often eat ramen. Even when we interpret it, it has an entirely different meaning (the correct one remarking on the whole of the year, the new one remarking on your current progress).
313
Ice-Kagen was suggesting using the present perfect, not the present. It is a form of past tense in English. So in your example it would instead be "I have had a lot of great trips". This feels like a much more natural way in English to talk about about a recent period that you are refering to with "this" and qualifying with "often". So for the above sentence, a more natural English translation would be "This year, I have often eaten a lot of ramen."
Unfortunately, studying English verbs won't help you here, because in English (at least in British English) we would say, "I have eaten", because as you rightly point out, the year hasn't finished. We have to remember that the authors of this course are not native English speakers, so sometimes the English is not quite natural.
1322
Why is it wrong to say: "This year I ate good ramen"? As I understand, よく can mean both "often" and "good".