"你喜欢吃中国拉面还是日本拉面？"
Translation:Do you like eating Chinese ramen or Japanese ramen?
67 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
864
Lamian is one very specific noodle dish. There are a gazillion other Chinese noodle dishes which are never called 拉面. It should accept "lamian" or "Chinese lamian" or "pulled noodles".
- 864
Somehow I never put these two together! I suppose because I've seen "lo mein" on menus, at least in Southeast Asia, but I don't think I know it from the Chinese food in here Australia. I learned "la mian" from my travels around mainland China and ate it several times.
- 864
I have two theories for the problematic wording of the Chinese here.
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拉面 is Chinese for lamian, pulled noodles; and Japanese for "ramen". Both the dishes and the words are surely related but are no longer at all the same, other than both being noodle dishes. In China you would only get "ramen" at a Japanese restaurant.
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Some English speakers use "ramen" to mean "instant noodles" and the person who wrote this one might have intended to ask whether somebody prefers Chinese or Japanese instant noodles.
In either case it makes perfect sense to qualify the terms in Chinese as 中国拉面 and 日本拉面, but in English "Chinese ramen" is puzzling and "Japanese ramen" is redundant.
do you like eating chinese or japanese ramen should be accepted, you dont need to repeat it in english for the same meaning
yeah there's a lot of sentences like that on duolingo where it's both accepted and not accepted so it's confusing af. I really wish they'd fix that
"Do you like to eat Chinese ramen or Japanese ramen?" should also be accepted...
English would not repeat ramen. If you are going from Chinese to English, "Do you like eating Chinese or Japanese ramen", needs to be accepted.
I answered it as 'Do you like Chinese ramen or Japanese ramen', without 'eat'. Not the most accurate, but definitely appropriate in everyday usage.
ramen is japanese, lamian is chinese. seems strange to call it chinese ramen. If we are using a generic word i think noodles would be better. Also if we are supposed to use a shared word "ramen" why would it not accept the more common english grammar "chinese or japanese ramen" removing the repeated word?
- 864
just saying "noodles' isn't enough. I've been in Taiwan for six or seven weeks now and there are lamian shops around here and I've eaten noodles many times but I haven't yet eaten lamian or ramen here.
Eating is unnecessary imho as they are both foods, so it should be accepted as 'Do you like Chinese noodles or Japanese ramen?'
There is a 吃 in the sentence. If they weren't testing if you got all the words in the sentence, then testing for translations does even make less sense than it does anyway. Translations are a bad way to learn a language in the first place, but they are sadly the only easy way to do comprehension checks on a website like this.
You can't translate a sentence word for word, that's not how languages work! Anyway, by this point in the course, knowing that 吃=to eat should be trivially easy. What I think is important about this sentence in particular is learning that in these kinds of situations, you have to include 吃 in Chinese, even though it's completely unnatural to use the word "eating" in the English sentence. Including the word "eating" in the English translation might make it easier to remember how to solve this particular exercise, but it obscures the important language point that learners should be getting from it!
You can translate word for word. That's not how languages work, but that's how language learning works. But it looks like a lot of people here want to be translators before the can speak the language. If you take the second step first, don't be surprised if you stumble.
- 864
For some people it's a useful stepping stone but not for everybody and not once you need the stepping stone any more. Forcing people into one-size-fits-all is not a great idea. We don't learn without stumbling.
Having said that I think there's a middle ground that's not necessarily word-for-word but is a best fit. When there's two natural translations and one uses all the words in the original it's better than one that abbreviates or just tries to get the gist. In this sentence I would definitely translate 吃 as eat or eating because it's there and it's natural to include it.
Translating one word at a time is not a good way of learning a language. You need to learn how words are actually used, which differs from language to language. That's why more modern methods focus on "lexical chunks" rather than individual words. My point was that by this point in the course, the user should already have learned the individual words in the sentence. The important point in this exercise is learning that if you want to say "I like [food]" in Chinese, you need to say "我喜歡吃[食物]", and that "我喜歡[食物]" is wrong. The weird English sentence obscures this point.
- 864
The English sentence is weird in a couple of ways but not for including the verb "eat". As a native English speaker I would say "Do you like to eat lamian or ramen?" or "Do you prefer eating lamian or ramen?" It's like the difference between "Do you like football?" and "Do you like playing football?"
In English you can say you like food, you like cooking food, you like eating food, and they're all natural. My Chinese isn't good enough to know the subtleties of whether 吃 is mandatory or optional. I knew of constructions where the opposite is true, that in English you can say "I like eating" or "I like to eat" whereas in Chinese you have to include an object for the verb and would say 吃饭 in the equivalent sentence.
Well, hippietrail, if you're a native English speaker and that's the way you say it, then by definition it's correct:P Perhaps this is a difference between US and UK English? I'm a UK English speaker, and I know that American English can tend to state things more explicitly in some circumstances (e.g. eyeglasses vs. glasses, horseback riding vs. horseriding, etc.)
However, a google search would indicate that including "eating" or "to eat" is not nearly as common as leaving it out. When I google the phrase "I like noodles" there are 220,000 hits, whereas "I like to eat noodles" gets less than 20,000 and "I like eating noodles" about 2,000. This isn't very scientific of course, but it does give a good indication of what normal usage is...
(Edit: wow, when I first posted this, it came up as posted by someone else, but I could delete it, weird!!!)
@Sraddhapa Word for word doesn't mean you translate them separately. It will be still sone in chunks actually short texts are even better than single sentences. It's purpose is to learn the syntax and grammar while actually not having to learn individual words.
And believe it or not, there are modern langauge learning methods, which are not really known in the Aglosphere, for example the Birkenbihl Approach (if you learn German, you can look her up - Vera F. Birkenbihl).
No offense ,but native English speakers are not known to be great speakers of other languages. Most "learn" some language in school, but I have hardly encoutered some one being fluent in a language, if they do not live in that country, and even then, it most of the time comes with a hefty accent.
Btw, I did not translate above words from German to English, even though German is my mother tongue.
Setting aside the problem of what 拉面 means in Chinese vs Japanese, I typed "Do you like eating Chinese or Japanese ramen." It's a little more natural to say it that way in English especially when you set up two adjectives to describe one noun. An example might be "Are you a fan of the American or Canadian hockey team?" rather than saying "Are you a fan of the American hockey team or the Canadian hockey team?". In the first example it's implied that both countries have a hockey team.
Granted, I understand that the literal translation in this case would require me to use "ramen/lamian" for both halves.
- 864
Well actually ramen is an English word, that comes from a Japanese word, that itself comes from a Chinese word.
With these questions with 还是 I never know if it is meant inclusive or not? Could the answer be "yes"? Or does the asker want to hear a choice of one of the two or a preference?
- 61
It means "or" in the sense or "Do you want A or B?", another word commonly used it 或, in the sentence above 还是 is colloquial.
It accepts "Do you like chinese ramen or japanese ramen" At least it accepts it now
Do you like eating Chinese or Japanese ramen? This sounds much better in English BUT in my opinion 拉面 is very different to ramen
Since the same word 拉面 is used for both Chinese ramen AND Japanese ramen, then the answer "Do you like eating Chinese or Japanese ramen?" should also be accepted
- 737
"Do you like eating Chinese pulled noodles or Japanese ramen" should definitely be accepted. "Chinese ramen" is an approximation, but 拉面 and 'ramen' have not been the same thing for a couple of centuries now. 兰州人 would not be thrilled with this translation either
“Do you like to eat Chinese or Japanese ramen” should be an acceptable translation.
The proposed answer "Do you like eating..." is certainly correct, but so is "Do you like to eat..."
- 864
I'd like to hear from a native Chinese speaker, but from what I can find, the usual way to say "prefer" is 比较喜欢.
Just like in English the context would tell you if you're being asked to choose between the two, or if they want to know if you like one, both or neither.
- 864
But the English word "prefer" does not have those two meanings. It only means "like more" / "like better" (than).
You can actually use "would prefer" for choices, but not "prefer" on its own.
- Would you prefer eggs or cereal for breakfast today? - Choose one
- I prefer eggs to cereal. - Preference = "I like eggs more than cereal".
I think you'd probably get punched if you called noodles ramen any Chinese restaurants, either in America or mainland China. There's a history there.
- 864
Well here in Taiwan you can get both the Japanese ramen and Korean ramyun but nobody would call the Chinese lamian "ramen".
This is where language and culture collide. Ramen is not a word known to the vast number of people in the UK who don't get near 'proper' foreign food. Noodles could be anything long and flour-based that is not spaghetti. The flour could be wheat, rice or any other starchy grain.
- 864
Ramen does not mean noodles. Ramen is 拉面 and noodles is 面条. Ramen is a specific noodle dish. (Well two completely different noodle dishes.)
why cant it be - Do you like eating Chinese or Japanese ramen? - it works in English there is no need to say ramen twice
The audio had a strange sound on the second half of the sentence. Maybe people were talking in the background.
Do you like eating Chinese or Japanese ramen? It is minimal good English. Common Duolingo!
- 272
Wow I'd never heard of ramen until now! (Although I did eat on a Japanese restaurant in Beijing in 2011 but I just ate what the group were having, can't remember what!)
Too many interpretations of 拉面. Make it a closed-ended Chinese box response rather than an open-ended translation.
