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- "星期天她们一般去跑步或者爬山。"
"星期天她们一般去跑步或者爬山。"
Translation:They usually go running or hiking on Sundays.
22 Comments
Indeed. With the simple present and an adverb such as "usually", there's no difference in meaning between "On Sundays..." and "On Sunday...".
Please fix 他们 vs. 她们 in audio exercises. Probably 50% of the "My solution should be accepted" reports I submit are due to this one bug.
In English there's a world of difference between hiking and mountain climbing. Is 远足 a common term in Chinese? Can I use it for "hiking"?
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When Chinese say 爬山 99% of the time they mean hiking or just a walk with a small hill!
I can remember having a confused conversation (雞同鴨講） with an elderly Chinese woman once, who insisted she went "mountain climbing" every week. It turned out she meant a Sunday stroll in the park…文化不同常常會搞不太情趣 …
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Not really, hiking is usually called 爬山. I've spent a good bit of time in China, even hiked a few times, and I've never heard 远足. I've heard 登山, but this is more a formal version of 爬山, and it too can refer to either hiking or mountaineering.
it's a little hard to find the exact counterpart of hiking in chinese. 远足 is a good word. I think 徒步旅行 or simply 徒步 is also okay.
It should probably be accepted, but it seems to me that the structure "go [verb]ing" is a little closer to the Chinese in a case such as this where you have "去+[verb]".
I like how this is translated. What kind of English (e.g. American, British, Australian) is this?
How do we know that tā is 她 and not 他? Is there some kind of gendered verb agreement?
Don't worry, it doesn't matter. 他 & 她 are literal habit, depends on the subject if you know He or She. In speaking, "tā" is fine. In Chinese, the subjects don't focus on gender.
It is not verb agreement. It is about whether the subject of the sentence is a man (他) or a woman (她).
Well, male or female, at least (as it also applies to children, not just to adults), but I believe the question was about when we hear the sentence out of context, as Duolingo was marking only one pronoun correct.
There's simply no way to know without context, of course, and it doesn't really matter with spoken Chinese anyway, because the pronunciation is the same.
(Incidentally, the feminine "她" in writing is a relatively recent phenomenon in Chinese, and is influenced by Western literature.)
If you really want to be specific about taking a stroll, you'd say 散步, if you want to say hiking it'd be 爬山
