"その国の名前は何ですか？"
Translation:What is that country's name?
16 Comments
1013
In contexts where the difference between "the" and "that" is not important, その can be translated as "the". Sometimes either works, but one may make more sense than the other. Sometimes, existing convention makes the choice obvious.
e.g. (on a game show) その答えは!? And the answer is!?
Also note that "and" appeared from nowhere because of the convention in English. Even for very closely related words, it's rare that you can do a simple word replacement and expect it to work for all cases.
I agree with what is said by Akira with on exception. In English we usually us the oarticle "the" to show specificity, but in tbis case "that" leave no question in the mind of the person being questioned. For this to be "the" i would have to assume that a previous discussion happened and i was being asked again about that specific country we had talked about. A cold question about the name of a certain cointey i would use the word "that."
Yes! I got really confused by this. I think Duo is trying to put articles in Japanese
It's accepted now. And I agree, that's the most natural way to say it. "What is the country's name?" is grammatical but odd-sounding.
- 1664
"What is that country named?" wasn't accepted, but to be fair, it's using name as a noun, not a verb here.
The build a sentence of this one was particularly difficult. I knew what to say, but figuring out "What is the country's name" was not what i could come up with.
- 600
FYI when this is a listening exercise, the correct response (その国の名前は何ですか) is being marked wrong for lack of a question mark.
- 906
Is there really no way to get 何 to be read as NAN instead of NANI? It's not a problem for me, but beginners in Japanese who try Duolingo are constantly subjected to the wrong pronunciation of the kanji, and often it's much worse than NAN vs. NANI. There must be a way for the computer experts at Duolingo to tag the kanji with the correct pronunciation, according to the context. Until that happens, I'm advising my beginning students to turn off the sound when working with Duolingo in Japanese.
