"九点差一刻。"
Translation:A quarter to nine.
77 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
699
Yes, 'a quarter to...' is commonly used in the UK,often if one wants to confirm times with another person. Eg. ' I'll meet you at a quarter to 9'...'Great,we will see you there at a quarter to 9 !' Though both ways both are OK. Its all rather nuanced and probably not worth losing any sleep over.
my native language is Dutch and we say 'quarter to...' so for me there's nothing wrong with it. Plus I believe some English speaking folks also use it. Still, it's not always about translating it correctly, I already think Duolingo focusses too much and too often on getting a grammatically correct answer in (American) English. That's all fun but that doesn't teach you the literal meaning of the Chinese sentence, which is very important if you want to truly understand this language.
1356
Articles (in English) are a, an and the. There's no article needed in this phrase though!
1747
A literal translation of the first is "nine awaiting a segment" (imagine the clock face as a pie with four equal segments) its used obviously here to tell the time i.e. "a quarter to nine". Rearranging the Chinede to form your second combination you get "awaiting segment nine o'clock" Chinese works with implied articles and context and a native speaker will add in implied words until it makes sense. So here it would imply "in a quarter of an hour it will be nine o'clock".
As a preposition, "till" is synonymous with "to;" as a conjunction, "till" is synonymous with "until" (but is not a shortened version of "until," as "till" was already a word in its own right for several centuries before "until" became a word). "A quarter to nine" and "a quarter till nine" are synonymous, and both phrases are correct.
In this sense of the word, "til" (without an apostrophe) is a variant spelling of "till;" as such, "a quarter til nine" is correct as long as "til" is an acceptable variant spelling of "till," but some people regard "til" as an incorrect spelling rather than a variant spelling.
"'Til," with an apostrophe, is indeed a shortened version of "until," but that's a different word with a different history, and yes, some writers drop the apostrophe, even when using "til" in its much more recent sense of a so-called "poetic abbreviation" of "until."
Exactly. This is not an English course so let's not expect that all 27,347 variants will show up here. Let's pick the most common way to say this in English to prove we've understood the Chinese; and move on.
Else we'll be here till next Christmas debating 'quarter to nine, 'quarter of nine', 'eight forty five pm', 'eight forty five am', 'sixteen hundred forty five hours', 'fifteen minutes to nine in the morning', 'fifteen minutes to nine in the evening', 'five minutes past eight forty in the morning', and two dozen thousand other grammatical gems because we are trying to learn Chinese? Eh?
The issue is that the Duo computer has to be given all possible answers that are to be accepted. Duo is only going to put standard English and common variations of standard English in the list of correct answers. They are not going to include answers that are clearly wrong in the list and cannot put all possible answers that nobody usually says in the list as well, both because there is no limit to the length of such a list and because they will not have thought of such answers as possibilities. If you think "one quarter to nine" should be accepted there used to be a tick box in the Report option that allows you to say that and Duo will then decide if they agree, but there is not one that I can see for this exercise, so it seems that something approximating correct English is the only thing that will get your answer accepted.
85
My understanding (possibly wrong) is that 差 is also "lack," and the role it plays here is like "menos" in Spanish, i.e. "nueve menos quince," or something like "it's lacking fifteen minutes to be nine o'clock." Very awkward in English, of course, but it works in Spanish or Chinese.
1627
Many Chinese characters can have multiple meanings depending on the context. The dictionary hints don't always show every meaning that a character might have. When it comes to time, it might help to think of 差 as "less than" or "minus".
"9:00 minus a quarter (0:15) " = 8:45
"a quarter less than 9:00" = 8:45
"It's a quarter to 9:00" = 8:45
"It's 8:45" = "It's 15 more minutes until 9:00" = "It's a quarter to 9:00"
231
I got correct on 9.45 and it says another translation is a quarter to nine. Which would be 8 45
995
why does this example have the hour first and then the minutes to the hour, when another example had it the opposite way?
462
I can try 8:45 next time and see if it works. The app accepted "A quarter to 9", but not "A quarter to 9:00".
630
It accepts "till" but not "til"? Both are informal. And it seems the "a" is still required.
870
It is right to say either "A quarter to nine" or "Quarter to nine". Both are perfectly natural and common ways to say it where I grew up in Australia.
1356
You do not need an article here. I'm a native speaker and I had never heard 'a quarter to' before I came across it in an ESL text in China.
1639
I have a correct answer and it is marked wrong. This is now happening every time I have to deal with "Tap What You Know"