"老师不是英国人。"
Translation:The teacher is not British.
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733
Forgive my ignorance, but what is the reason behind this change?
I don't find the new characters particularly easier to write or recognize (do note that I am a complete neophyte).
China now has a literacy rate around 96%. In the start of the 20th century that number was much smaller and many thinkers/politicians were trying ways to encourage literacy, so they chose to simplify the characters.
The change was applied by Mao Zedong's governmnent in the People's Republic of China territory. That means it was not applied in Taiwan (Republic of China territory), Hong Kong (British territory), and Macau (Portuguese territory), so these regions kept using the traditional characters and still keep using it now.
Some more complexly written characters made major changes: 環 vs 环 are the same in traditional and simplified respectively.
Keep in mind, simplified wasn't invented overnight either. It has been around for centuries as an informal shorthand. As in people got lazy and sort of scribbled a bit in somewhat of a cursive to save time. This resulted in fewer strokes per character, this simplified. The People's Republic of China choose to standardize the shorthands where it made sense. So characters are never going to be super different between the two.
They seem to have changed the above sentence which now says "The teacher is British." which would be more common to avoid the "an"/"a" dilemma. I hope that you reported that. I bet that happened after they changed "a" to "an" for "English person". They just can't win! They need to keep the article as part of the noun "an English person" and "a British person" would both be correct.
This course simply has a weakness in English expression and the person responsible for simplified Chinese only knew simplified English. There are many cases where the app can't understand more advanced English syntax. Even with this weakness the main app is still well designed and works well even if it forces us to use inferior English....
1144
Does 英国 refer to all of the UK, all of Britain, or just England? Because they are very different terms, yet the key says all are correct...
It does not necessarily refer to the UK which is 联合王国
So it looks as though when England added a few countries to become Great Britain, China did not feel the need to change the characters yet, but now the UK is different. Practically though, I am sure that some people still use the old characters. Look how many people still say "Holland" for "The Netherlands". Please correct me if I am wrong, native Chinese speakers!
们 would be added after a noun that denotes a person to make it plural. I do not know if it is ambiguous without it. You certainly cannot tell by the verb which always remains the same for singular and plural. The nouns do not change forms for singular or plural, however in Chinese they often add other words to the sentence to indicate plural, such as "many", "those" or a number specifying how many.
http://mylanguages.org/chinese_plural.php
https://www.duolingo.com/skill/zs/Occupation/tips-and-notes
I have since found out that with the plural marker it is definitely plural, but without the plural marker it can still be plural or singular. Apparently many people just don’t bother to use the plural marker. So you should report it next time.
543
I'm still a beginner in Chinese but I think where you are thinking "English person" (because the word "ren" literally translates as "person"), the English meaning of "English person" is covered just by using a word that implies that we are talking about a person. If you say someone is "British" or "American", or "Chinese", then it implies that you mean "this person is this nationality". I know others might be clearer but basically the sense that you are talking about a person is already included in the English, without needing to use the actual word. And they are using British to be more precise, since England is only part of the nation called United Kingdom now.
In Chinese, they are not using a demonym though, are they? It would be considered impolite and the teacher's name would be used, I think. I sometimes hear small children talk about their teacher this way, but again it is not very polite and we just chalk it up to the children being young. Teachers don't live at school, after all. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/demonym
This should be "The teacher" or "A teacher" or we should include the person's name. Some teacher's do let children call them "Teacher", but that is not the name of the teacher and that is not the intention of the Chinese word to refer to the teacher by name, or is it?
Of course, what do I really know? Try reporting it to see what happens. The more I think about it the more I wonder if that is not common in China, after all?
Nevermind, scroll up someone already said that some accepted answers did include "Teacher is not..."