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- "这里没有红绿灯。"
"这里没有红绿灯。"
Translation:There are no traffic lights here.
22 Comments
Unfortunately, it's still rejected. Duolingo suggests "There is not a traffic light here." which is significantly less natural.
Of course, the stupid owl hasn't graduated in English yet.... As well as there are no stop lights... Should be accepted as correct.
Just a quick FYI, make sure to report the sentences if you believe they're missing something, else the course contributors won't see your comment
"there are no traffic lights here" is also exactly what I had and is more correct than the singular answer given imho. Don't know why you were down voted. Just up voted you
1213
The plural form is not more correct. The two say something slightly different, and are responses to different conditions or assumptions. In this case, for me, the key variable is what is meant by 'here.' If we meant a wider area, like here (in this town), I would most certainly use the plural, because I would have expected there to be several. On the other hand, if 'here' meant a smaller area in the immediate vicinity of the speaker, say just one intersection, as I would be more inclined to interpret it without further context, I would not expect to find more than one traffic light, and would use the singular form.
Technically the correct grammatical sentence is "There is no traffic light here." "Are" is used for plural and when the subject is zero or none the singular should be used. Most speakers will use the plural even though it is grammatically incorrect.
I think you're hyper correcting! There is a semantic difference between e.g. "there are no apples here" and "there is no apple here". The first is just an observation, the second implies you were looking for an apple that was supposed to be there but wasn't. In general use, zero is plural because you are indicating the lack of a countable collection.
Agreed. In fact, zero is always plural. You would never say "there is zero apple". It must be said as "there are zero apples".
The only reason we can say "there is no apple" is because it is the literal negative version of "there is one apple".
I know this has been posted over a year ago, but that is now the default translation.
I, too, wrote: "There's no traffic light here." I suppose some of us can also refer to them as stop lights (or stop light).
"There's no stoplight here" is accepted now. I'm not sure about stop light (2 words), technically I think it should be one word.
suggested to me was "There is not a traffic light here." isn't that incorrect english?
