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- "からいですか?"
"からいですか?"
Translation:Is it spicy?
59 Comments
Oh, interesting. I never made the connection before, but the kanji for two separate words, からい and つらい, are actually identical; context would be the only way to tell them apart.
- 辛い【からい】= "spicy, hot"
- 辛い【つらい】= "arduous, painful, heart-breaking"
I think つらい is generally only written in hiragana though, so the default reading of 辛い would be からい (I'm not a native speaker so I may be wrong about that).
650
I believe so, yup haha
It's said that context generally defaults to yourself for sentence structures like this, but I doubt people will think you're referring to yourself if you say this particular sentence out of the blue without context :P Without said context, my anime-fu tells me the response will usually end up as "何 (なに) が?" which I believe translates to "What is?"
But yeah, this sentence technically reads something like "____ spicy?", and you can fill in the blank with any topic/subject that you want :P Otherwise it's contextual.
This is a bona fide Duo bug. In "Type what your hear"-type exercises, the system picks the main answer for the exercise, runs it through TTS, and expects you to write that back to you. In this case, the main answer is kana-spelled, and an alternative answer is spelled using kanji.
Now, the problem is that if you write back an alternative answer you get an error, since that is not what it spoke to you. However, it has no concept of "this alternative answer is really the same phrase, but using an alternative orthography;" it thinks you used a synonym, and marks you wrong for it. Ordinarily, it would be right; but not in this specific case.
Of course, the problem is that there is no straightforward way to mark sentences as being "more equal" so they are accepted in "type what your hear" exercises.