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- "明天是她的生日，我想送花给她。"
"明天是她的生日，我想送花给她。"
Translation:It is her birthday tomorrow, I want to give her flowers.
33 Comments
568
Surely the phrase 送花给 does not translate in English to 'give her flowers', but instead 'send her flowers'. Otherwise it would be 给她花 with no 送. Am I right?
No, they are not. "It's her birthday tomorrow. I want to send her flowers." not accepted, December 2018.
送 specifies that these flowers are given as a gift. If you only use 给, it could mean that you are "giving" the flowers in the sense of picking them up and handing them to her, or giving the flowers in exchange for something.
Why not indeed.
Assuming you go on to translate the other part of the sentence.
Because it's telling you to translate the whole sentence, you've missed "it is her birthday tomorrow" lol
I think this sentence is literally "Tomorrow is her birthday. I would like to send flowers to give to her.", therefore, "Tomorrow is her birthday. I would like to send flowers to her." should be accepted. (The "to give" part is too awkward to include in an English translation.)
- 922
"It is her birthday tomorrow. I want to send her flowers" still not accepted. Reported 18th October 2018.
I was under the impression that "gei ta" needs to come before "song hua", since it acts as a preposition that determines what the main verb means. Am I partially or completely wrong?
- 230
I have put in the correct answer several times. Your program answer is incorrect. Please correct it. Thank you
- 36
"It is her birthday tomorrow, I want to give flowers to her" rejected as of 2019-05-28. Reported.
- 36
Also: "Her birthday is tomorrow, I want to give flowers to her" Rejected as of 2019-06-02.
Could anybody elaborate on this sentence structure 送 + 花 + 给 + 她, I've never come across this construction, neither in course books nor in real life, the way it is put here sounds like a 把字句 where suddenly 送 takes the role of 把/将, is this standard? What dialect is this? Many thanks in advance
- 1216
This is a very ordinary type construction that has both a direct object, flowers / 花, and an indirect object, the recipient, her / 她. There are two main things, however, that can be sources of confusion, and these are the words 送 and 给, that each have more than one meaning or use. In addition to meaning send, deliver, carry, or send/ see off, 送 is also used to mean give as a gift. And finally, although we may initially learn 给 only as the verb to give, it is also routinely used to indicate the indirect object of a transitive verb (the recipient of the direct object) as well as to indicate a person for the sake or benefit of whom something is done. No obscure structure here, just straight forward stuff, once you realize that in Chinese, like English and other languages, many words have more than one meaning or use. Learning to sort this out, however, is one of the tough parts of language learning, and if it gives us any solace, is one of several big challenges still facing machine translators.
The order can be either 送给她花 (which my textbook used) or 送花给她 (which Duolingo uses). In this case, 送 means to give as a gift, and 给 shows to whom the gift is being given.
It's not natural to say "She has a birthday tomorrow." It should be "Tomorrow is her birthday" or "Her birthday is tomorrow." You always HAVE a birthday. The question is what day your birthday IS.
