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- "老师姓什么？"
"老师姓什么？"
Translation:What is the teacher's last name?
127 Comments
Dont foget thr apostrophe on teacher's or you will have to do it over. How stupid
710
Apostrophe = posession No apostropne = plural
There is a big difference in meaning so it is important.
Not really . Both possesssives as in this case require an apostrophe , but it depends on where
You are correct but i wrote one time with the apostrophe it said wrong then i didnt and it said wrong so i am very confused x
If you don't know when to use an apostrophe, you should probably take the English course before the Chinese course.
To be clear, the "correct" answer accepted from me was "What's the teachers last name"... Ridiculous.
I don't know why you went about typing a wrong answer and why was it erroneously accepted too.
The correct answer is shown at the top already. Which is what I had typed and got accepted "What is the teacher's last name?"
So the course obviously knows which apostrophes are used, and so did I ;-)
@Timothy - it was refreshing to see you say "How stupid" instead of "Whoa stanford" and then expecting us to understand what you obviously meant. Thanks for the favour. :-)
WHat kind of school do you go to, whatever school you go to, the education for english there is not good, the apostrophe shows possession.
i agree very stupid... I was 1 point away from finishing but ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
(From a native speaker)Actually,"老" here is a symbol of reverence. ”老师“ is a single word merely meaning 'teacher' and you shouldn't construe it into two separate words. We Chinese prefer bi-character-words. Accordingly, even if “师” does mean 'teacher' by itself, we still choose “老师“ in a usual conversation. Likewise, we have words like “老虎” meaning 'tiger' and “老鹰” meaning 'eagle' in which “老“ conveys nothing.
Your comment made me realize the lessons are titled Chinese and not Chinese Simplified or more specifically Mandarin Simplified since Cantonese & many others are "Chinese" but not mutually intelligible
There is no 吗，nor 马 in the sentence.
The sentence in pīnyīn is:
- lǎoshī xìng shénme?
Nope, for example táiwān, 台湾 (simplified), 台灣 (traditional), the forms of ma like 吗, 妈, 马, 码, 蚂 all have traditional characters 嗎, 媽, 馬, 碼, 螞.
So, Is this Lao(老) the same Lao in Lao Tzu(Zi)? Meaning Lao Tzu(Zi) means Master Teacher?
It is indeed the same, but 老 actually translates to "old". Hence, Laozi (老子）actually means "Old Master".
- 458
Great question! Not stupid at all because no one else has asked it in this thread.
The answer is not possible. The particle 吗 (ma) is used to form yes/no questions by adding it to the end of a statement (can be both positive or negative).
- 老师姓王吗？ Is the teacher surnamed Wang?
- 老师不是姓王吗？ Isn't the teacher surnamed Wang?
The question here is a query (meaning you need to provide some information, not just yes/no). The particle 呢 (ne) can be added to the end. If there is another question word in the sentence, 呢 can be omitted.
- 你呢？ What about you?
- 老师姓什么(呢)？ What is the teacher surnamed?
- 老师是谁(呢)？ Who is the teacher?
"姓" is a verb, so "What is the teacher surnamed?" should be accepted. "姓" equivalent to "is surnamed" is accepted in other sentences, but not here.
Is the possessive always implied in a sentence like this? Aka, would 老师的姓什么 be correct, or is the 的 just not necessary?
- 458
Either use 姓xìng as a verb or a noun. (Bold below are verbs of the sentences)
As a noun: 老师的姓是什么？ (Sounds a bit awkward but still OK)
As a verb: 老师姓什么？
Come on Duo… calling me out for a freaking apostrophe? I wrote this on my phone—obviously it's a typo!
Can yoy u please mark it as typo or somethong : - ; but thanks for reminding me anyway
- 458
Literally "ten persons," derived meaning is "ten," "ten things," "a group of things."
You cannot separate the word. 什么 is one word which means "what."
What's your old teacher's last name? Was my answer. Is that wrong? Thanks
The correct answer should be "What is the teacher's last name?". You've added the possessive pronoun "your" which is unnecessary because that did not exist in the Mandarin sentence. It is just "the teacher". 老师 (laoshi) is a title for teachers/masters of various kinds. I simply wrote "What's teacher's last name?" and it was accepted as correct.
I'm not sure. 老师 means teacher according to the hints (hover your mouse over the characters and you'll see what I mean), but according to google translate, old teacher is also 老师 so I'm not entirely sure to be honest.
It told me the translation was "what is our last name of the teacher?" which threw me off because it made no sense and I had put "what is the teacher's last name?" but I just kept getting wrong for that reason
Where does it say the translation is "what is our last name of the teacher?"?
it does. My answer was "what's your surname, teacher?" and duo gave me that weird translation.
Not confused. ..there were no words to place exactly the answer regardless of meaning. My answer was not wrong according to info presented!
What if i want to ask the "teachers" last name and not the "teacher's" ?
- 458
You mean "teachers' last names"? (There should be an apostrophe after teachers to make it possessive.)
The Chinese translation to it is 老师们姓什么
How would it be written for "what are our teacher's last names" instead of what is the teacher's last names?
老师叫什么 is what i put 8n english i swear. But is this simplified or traditional chinese.
- 280
As in English I would use the apostrophe in teacher's to denote possession, would I not need this in Chinese too? Making the sentence...
老师的姓什么
- 458
There are two ways. Note that 姓 is a verb in the Chinese sentence, so an equivalent English is "What is the teacher surnamed?" If we need to use the noun for 姓, then the Chinese sentence needs a verb: 老师的姓是什么？
I forgot to put in 1 apostrophe and i got the whole question wrong. I know it's incorrect grammar, but it is kinda annoying.
- 267
For us non-native speakers of English, it is kinda annoying having to read English written with bad grammar by native speakers. (For instance, missing or redundant apostrophes, should of, there instead of their etc. etc.)
I kept entering "What is the teacher's last name," as the correction suggested and continued to get it marked as false. I finally took "the" from in front of "teacher's" out and it accepted my answer. Please fix?
They should get the pronunciation to be slower. All I heard was "Lao shi sheng me?"
Wish they could slow down the vocals, especially the male. Hard to understand at times.
@Joseph - No. It is not possible. There is no "what" in your Chinese sentence. 吗 simply converts the sentence into a Yes / No question. It is not the equivalent of 什么 (what).
@phyo - no, that's incorrect. Teacher's name means name of the teacher.
We don't say "What is you name", and similarly we don't say "What is teacher name".
We change the "you" to "your" and "teacher" to "teacher's".
Makes sense?
It would help if this type of excercise has a feature to slow down the speaking, also having 3 different voices with what appears to have 3 different pronounciation makes it tricky at times.
That s should have been attached to the word teacher We are learning words not letters
"What's teacher's last name" was an accepted answer for me. The definite article is implied in mandarin from what I understand.
Seriously Duolingo, fix the apostrophe thing already. Most of us learn on our phones... I think our bad habits can be forgiven.
@Jesus-smith - You already know Chinese. Stop learning it. If you said anything that came to your mind and Duolingo didn't accept it, then you'd shout and force them to accept it anyway. So why bother learning? ;-)
You can find out by putting the mouse over the characters in the sentence. But just to help you out:
- 老师 - Lǎo shī - Teacher
- 姓 - Xìng - Surname
- 什么 - Shén me - What
So literally translated, 老师姓什么？would be "Teacher surname what?" which you can then translate to "What is the teacher's surname?"
Sorry for asking a really basic question, but how do you know which combination of characters forms a particular new word? For example, 老 means "old" and 师 means "division" (at least according to google translate) so how does one know that 老师 means teacher and not the individual meanings of the words (i.e. "old division")?
The characters all seem to be equidistant so I'm not seeing anything which indicates that particular characters should be combined to form a single word.
Seriously...get kver the apostrophe. Aa bad as some of these alternative translations are, seriously?
Jesus, what a joke that you need to put the apostrophe. Clearly if you type the words, you understand it.
- 299
But remember that Duolingo is a robot, and it knows that "teacher's..." is possession and "teachers" is plural.
So we have to be a bit more careful with the grammar.
@Martin - isitajokealsothatyouneedtoputspacesbetweenwordsClearlyifyoutypethewordsyouunderstanditordontyou
For your information, these joke things are called punctuation. :-)
