"晚饭的菜真少。"
Translation:There is very little food at dinner.
83 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
Definitely a broken question for now. And yes, this can be present or possibly even future tense.
Without context, it should be assumed to be present tense, because there was no marker given for past or future tense.
I hope this helps!
Thats the implied meaning. The literal translation is like: "dinner's cuisine/dish is lacking/few". It still makes sense; the English translation will never be perfect and Duo doesn't translate like this because it would confuse a lot of people.
6.3.2018, now it is accepted. Sucks, though, that 'there is really little food for dinner' is not accepted, even though 真 translates as 'really' rather than 'very'.
1626
Since 少 relates to quantity, you could say:
"The amount of food for dinner is really small."
"There is a really small amount of food for dinner."
"There is a really small number of dishes for dinner."
- 869
"There is really little food" sounds very unnatural to me. Possibly because "really" is pretty colloquial and "little" isn't very colloquial.
Way too many ways to translate this for this program to capture them all correctly. Need to rework the sentence to make it viable to answer correctly.
- 869
I see no reason this should insist the English translation must be past tense. Also "for dinner" is much more natural than "at dinner".
This question is awkward and needs to be rewritten. Its meaning is clear in Chinese (i.e "Dinner's dishes [are] really little/few), but trying to write a natural sounding English sentence while tip-toeing around what I think Duolingo wants to hear makes it incredibly awkward.
- 803
It accepts "There is really not much food at dinner" now! I got this as a 'use these words' excercise. But I didn't know where to put my 'really' (put it in the end) and if I should use 'to' or 'at'. 'For' would be more clear.
- 721
This is a really unnatural sentence. Duo, five people have downvoted it, so please rework it. 謝謝你們！
- 1916
"There is not really much food for dinner" was not accepted. It suggested "There is not very much food for dinner." Then thay was accepted, but it suggested another translation was "There is really not much food for dinner." Should have accepted the original answer.
Whatever, I understood what the chinese sentence meant. "There's really not much for dinner." It leads me to wonder, though, whether the chinese sentence is grammatically correct or natural...
- 291
This is correct, but how are we supposed to get "There is really not much food at dinner." from "Dinner's food really few."?
- 869
The first step would be to quit expecting ultra-literal 1:1 translations between two languages.
This is probably the worst duolingo translation I've seen so far, and there's a lot of bad ones to choose from!
- 869
Haha no way. The "I feel that my body is not comfortable" one is a lot worse. By comparison this one is just a tiny bit quirky.
- 1355
There aren't many guests AT dinner. There isn't much food FOR dinner. Why is 'at' still the 'preferred' answer? It's so unnatural.
- 1023
This is another of those very annoying and stupid sentences (like "she dresses up beautifully" and that one about making pretty desserts). If you hate it from the beginning of the unit, you must face the idiotic sentence over and over as you go through the lessons! Sometimes I just hit skip!
In English we would say, "there wasn't enough food at dinner" and in Chinese you might say "there were too few dishes [of food] at dinner."
- 283
Such a weird English sentence. I knew what the sentence meant but i had to do mental contortions to come up with the expected English sentence. I'm English we say "For dinner" not "at dinner".
- 1078
Saying that "There is very little dinner" is an equivalent way to say "There is very little food at dinner".
"The dinner is light" wasn't accepted, I think that is one of the most sane translations.
I really think that before releasing a course (even in beta version) the conceptors should aim at providing a near-exhaustive list of possible alternate sentences. Crowd-sourcing is of course a good idea but it takes ages to integrate all possible sentences and the course is still not playable. I don't understand the rush to release a course. Quality should prevail over early availability, especially considering that many of us signed up for Pro.
真 is colloquial and much closer to «really», than «very». «There is very little food» hence is less correct than say, «There is really little food for dinner», which is marked as incorrect.
Seems tricky to translate
Also, when would you use this...? (Actually asking because I don't know, not trying to be rhetorical)
- 1618
Wow.. After all this time the preferred English is still "there is really not much food at dinner".. it's so unnatural.
Does anyone else have the problem where a submitted answer matches the expected one exactly, but is still marked wrong ? I think this my be an Android problem. I am a Plus Member (paying customer); it stops me from going ahead.
could someone explain to me why, 'There dinner food is very little' was wrong?
"There is very little dinner food." is also 100% correct. This one really needs context to be translated correctly.
- 684
That would mean that the food is "small": that is only possible if you want to describe that the portions are small.
"There is very little dinner" should be perfectly acceptable too and it sounds less awkward than saying "There is very little food at dinner"
As an English speaker, you can't have "very little food AT dinner". It's incorrect. I understand trying to be close as possible to the original words for translation but that is just wrong even in English grammar. It would've made more sense if it was something along the lines of "There is not much food for dinner" or "There aren't many dishes for dinner".
'There is very less food at the dinner' is wrong .why? This translation needs exactly what it is saved. Very Rigid and terrifying
'There is really little food for dinner' was turned down and corrected to 'there is very little food for dinner'. It's really annoying that in some traslations the 'really', which is the main translation of 真, is accepted and in some forms of that sentence it is not.
But as someone said here, there are WAY too many possible translations for this sentence.
My aim is just to learn Chinese. When Duolingo judges my English as incorrect, I open the discussion site as a tab. I read through the comments there to grab the meaning, but I do not repeat testing my English. When Duoligo asks the same question, I just copy and paste the Duolingo's answer already shown on the opened tab. This makes my life easier.
come on now '"晚饭的菜真少。"Translation:There is really not much food at dinner.'
This "right answer" is really impossible to predict. The literal translation is: "Dinner's food is really little" Please allow for more flexibility in translating this sentence
This is one of the cases that Duolingo only accepts one single possible answer. It is horrible!
There is really little food at dinner (IS better because the "Zhen " in the question.
