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- "My little sister and I play …
"My little sister and I play table tennis every day."
Translation:我和我的妹妹每天玩乒乓球。
22 Comments
Yes, in fact native speakers never use "玩" like this. I play table tennis with Chinese people every day and they will look at you strange of you say this. "玩" is used for playing video games, board games, etc. ("玩游戏"). In this case "打乒乓球" is correct and even DL teaches it that way in an early lesson. Perhaps DL is trying to show the literal English translation here, but people don't say this.
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My guess when I saw 玩 was that it was supposed to indicate that "my sister and I" were just having fun with it and not really competing. Like the difference between "leka" and "spela" in my native Swedish. You wouldn't say "leka" table tennis, but if you did, I would asume that you're just hitting the ball back and forth and not counting points (or, I guess, that you were playing pretend and there was no real table tennis at all...). Could this be the case?
I agree, I have never heard 玩乒乓球, only 打 But I am also not a native speaker, and I haven't spent a lot of time 打乒乓球 :P
As far as I know, you always put yourself first in a list in Chinese (the opposite of English).
How many different placements of 每天 are there within this sentence?
Is 我每天和我的妹妹玩乒乓球 ungrammatical? My intuition tells me it's fine but I'm not a native speaker so I don't really trust that.
From the standpoint of an ABC and someone who lived in Shanghai for 6 years, yes. Generally the entire subject goes first in a sentence. Otherwise it sounds unnaturally burdensome.
I was taught that close family members don't require the '的', but this course seems to be hit and miss so far.
No. I've even had Chinese people correct me on that before, it's more natural without .
I put the order of my sister and I to be the way it reads in Chinese and the English said I was wrong.
Chinese and English have opposite rules about putting yourself in a list!
