"我带了两瓶中国白酒。"
Translation:I brought two bottles of Baijiu.
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This is definitely baijiu, but the translation of "American White Wine" on another question is also 白酒，when it should be 白葡萄酒 to mark the difference. The answers need to differentiated or made consistent.
Chinese itself is inconsistent on this one, and that's probably why the Chinese for this exercise says "中国白酒", which is one way in which native Chinese speakers sometimes differentiate "actual" baijiu from "白葡萄酒", i.e., white wine, which can also simply be called "白酒" in contrast with 红酒, i.e., red wine or 红葡萄酒, even though that's rather confusing.
Personally I'd prefer it if baijiu were the only drink to be called "白酒", and if white wine were always called "白葡萄酒", but I don't have any control over the Chinese language.
There are other contenders for the name "白酒" as well, including a couple of Japanese drinks, and there's a disambiguation on Chinese Wikipedia:
In English, though, it's important not to call "中国白酒" "Chinese white wine", because it's not wine. And in English we can call it "baijiu" without preceding it with "Chinese", because we don't have some other drink called "baijiu" to differentiate it from.
(Even if we consider that a couple of kinds of Japanese drinks can be referred to with the same Chinese characters, in English we would transliterate these from the Japanese pronunciation or use a hybrid term such as "white sake".)
As a side note, in English, "baijiu" shouldn't be capitalized, in spite of Duo's preference, as it's a common noun, not a proper noun.
Thanks, this is helpful. I've never heard anyone call it "中国白酒" in China, so it seemed weird to have to add the "中国." Now I know to be specific outside of the mainland.
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2020.7.15
Perhaps one day it maybe called 外國白酒 or 外白酒 for short. When I hear 白酒 in Mando, I instantly think of the potent baijiu stuff rather than the tamer white wine even though that's the name for both. Or maybe Chinese needs to come up with a loanword for wine
I have also heard what we in the west would call "white wine" (wine made from white grapes) referred to as 白红酒 (lit., "white red wine") in mainland China.
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I've never heard any Chinese person saying "Chinese baijiu”, and I drunk a lot of baijiu with Chinese people.
Nevertheless.
All you have to do is search the web for "中国白酒" and you'll get millions of hits in a couple of seconds.
白酒 in China and Taiwan have different meanings. In Taiwan, it means white wine白葡萄酒. In China, it means a type of liquors. (clear, transparent)
白酒 is Baijiu in this sentence and 白酒 is white wine in another sentence. What is this 'consistency' you speak of?
Also, 'I have brought (...)' should definitely be accepted. But again, this course almost never accepts perfect tenses.
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But in English, without a time marker (e.g. yesterday), the present perfect is used. This sentence should be "I have brought..."
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Not if the action is on going. Something that was initiated yesterday may still be happening and incomplete, thus not perfected. People often get confused with tense and aspect. Tense is a general reference to past present or future. Aspect tells you the length of action or the process and whether that has been completed.
Note well: you can have future perfect. As in "I will have had explained temporal grammatical rules by the time you finish reading this sentence."
What?? Aspects are for both completed and ongoing events in the flow of time- that is precisely their role to determine this. Unlike tenses, they don't use inflections to determine a location in time. 了 is also an aspect marker, not a tense marker. There are no grammatical markers of tense in Chinese - only markers of aspect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_grammar
This means we can choose了 if we feel the action is completed but still what we might translate into present perfect. https://www.chineseboost.com/grammar/le-and-guo/
Although it is not necessary to have a time adverb/noun for past tense, English does often use it for clarification and by doing so we know not to use the perfect aspect. That's all he's trying to say.
BTW Future tense is not technically considered a separate tense since it does not involve any inflections of the verb. So, your example of future perfect is just another perfect aspect with an auxiliary to denote future.
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I am sitting here reading your comment wondering why the tone seems antagonistic yet the material contradicts very little of my own.
This seems to mix some distinct notions. Different languages have different tense-aspect-mood (‘TAM’) systems, and these elements, or combinations of them, may be expressed by affixes, by mutations of the verb, by auxiliaries, by explicit phrasing—or more exotically by markings on elements other than the verb, changes in word order, and probably other things I haven't thought of. Tense, aspect and mood are the (not always precisely defined) abstract analytical concepts, regardless of how they are expressed. Whether a tense (or an aspect or a mood) is “technically separate” has more to do with the rigidity (or degree of grammaticalisation) of the construction than whether the language has an inflection system. If the language has a large set of interchangeable affixes that apply to both nouns and verbs, say (“I exmarry my exwife” but also “I gladmarry my gladwife”), you could still make a strong case that there is “not technically” a separate tense even though, viewed in isolation, there might appear to be inflectional tense.
No. Completed actions that, by translation, take the English perfect aspect can be represented by just 了in many cases (Eg Wo dao le = I have arrived or I arrived).
As you know, some of what we call present perfect aspects are complete (eg 他去了(Tā qù le.) He's gone. / He went; 他死了Tā sǐle (He's died). These may translate to an English simple past or present perfect. That's our problem not the 了's problem because the 了 is not a tense marker but an aspect marker.
While you are right that the 了 does tend to be for completed actions,, some 了 constructions are ongoing Eg 他 在 北京 住 了 两 年 了。
I also think 过了 would be more likely used for a straight present perfect translation here but I would not be surprised if this sentence, with the 了 only, could translate to it as well.
- 104
2020.7.15
Although I do agree with most of what you said ( even though I find people's use of tenses and aspects confusing ) , I don't think most people fail to comprehend a double 了 pattern to indicate something started in the past and is still onging. That's rather distinct like your eg:
他在北京住了两年了。
It's when
昨天她吃早饭。
昨天她吃了早饭。
and it's a tense, no it's an aspect that doesn't seem to help educated many with an English mind. All I know is she did something involving breakfast yesterday
How about?
她吃早饭 vs
她吃了早饭
Duo has interesting transalations for both.
And the 500 kg gorilla in the room question:
她吃了早饭。 vs
她吃早饭了。
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Why isn't it called Baijiu in the notes at the beginning of the lesson where it explains that it can mean white wine or Chinese spirits? People not familiar with Chinese spirits don't know Baijiu.
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I wrote just baijiu, then it was rejected. Baijiu is Chinese liquor. I don't think we have to put Chinese in this word as long as it means baijiu.
This is one way in which Chinese attemps to deconfuse a situation that has been confused in the language. In English, we understand that "baijiu" and "white wine" are different. In Chinese, "白酒" is sometimes used in contrast to "红酒", red wine. Where there's insufficient context, then, to specify 白酒 of the original Chinese style of liquor, Chinese resorts to adding "中国".
We can still translate this as "baijiu" because the confusion doesn't exist in English, given that there's nothing else in English called "baijiu", and baijiu is clearly not wine.
I welcome corrections on the Chinese by a native Chinese speaker, but this is my understanding of the matter.
In mainland China, 白酒 refers to a clear hard liquor that is made in China. And I've never heard it called anything other than "baijiu".
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Chinese liquor as a phrase may not be specific enough. 白酒 is often drank in a small glass alone, yet many Chinese dishes call for using a similarly made liquor distilled for cooking. Also, the Chinese would not refer to 白酒 as Chinese liquor.
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it is much better her for chinese students like me instead if baijiu you write white wine
Baijiu is not wine. Chinese sometimes confuses the two drinks by imprecisely using "白酒" for both, but we don't confuse them in English, and when Chinese people say "中国白酒", they mean the Chinese liquor called baijiu, so differentiating it from white wine.
Let me know if you think I'm mistaken on the Chinese part of the equation, but it's important to understand the difference in English.
- 104
2020.12.23
That refined and sophisticated huh? lol Sounds similar to drinking vodka in plastic bottles
That's an interesting suggestion. I'm not sure of the range of meanings of "Schnaps" in German, but to my mind "schnaps" doesn't quite work as a translation of "白酒" in English, as schnaps as it's conceived of in English is fruit-based or infused with flavoring and therefore isn't quite the same as baijiu.
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Thank you for your help and sorry for my bad english. As far as I can remember, baijiu is more like rather tasteless, high-proof industrial alcohol.
What is this even about? What happened to 中国? If, as the gloss says, this is about white wine (which I'm not sure is true—wine ≠ alcohol, surely), why is the answer not about white wine? Most of these exercises make some kind of sense. Is Baijiu a tradename? Is that why it's capitalised? But then what explains the 中国? Traumatised.
A “pair” in English means a matched set of two things, either by design (“a pair of shoes”) or coincidence (“a pair of idiots”). There's no suggestion here that the bottles of liquor form any kind of set. A better option in British English is “couple”. When applied to people this implies two people with a romantic attachment, but otherwise just means two things considered together or informally grouped (“I saw a couple of new houses today”). This doesn't work in US English, though, where the two meanings of “couple” are separated. In the US “a couple” is still exactly two people in a romantic relationship, but “a couple of things” could be any small number of items, and is essentially synonymous with “a few”. In any case, the safest route to being understood is to use “two” for everything but the romantic case.
Why isn't it OK to use "took" instead of "brought" as a translation of 带 ?
It should be accepted.
However, roughly speaking, "take" is "带去" and "bring" is "带来", so it depends on the perspective of the speaker relative to the action. Often we use "bring" (or in the past tense, "brought") in a sentence like this because we think of it from the perspective of the destination, e.g. a party or other gathering that we will be (or were) part of.
It should be accepted, though more formally, sticklers prefer "a couple of bottles of".