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- "我最喜欢用手机拍照。"
"我最喜欢用手机拍照。"
Translation:I like taking pictures with the phone the most.
70 Comments
Does anyone else find these type of questions really hard to answer? I find it very difficult to get the wording right to get the computer to accept it
759
Yes 100X
A great course, nice that it is free, very good for practice, but the narrow range of English answers is ridiculous. It means you are always getting things wrong when you know they are right. But nothing changes here, so many of the same comments made even 12 months ago. Do they ever read the blog? And if you try to report it there is no way you can explain it under the options they give you.
- 759
Did this one again with the answer: "I like taking pictures with my cellphone the most". Which it accepted, but said:
"You missed a space".
"I like taking pictures with my phone the most" appears to be the right answer.
After teaching me in many lessons that a cellphone different to an ordinary phone by being called a 手机, which they use in this Chinese sentence.
A standard telephone or phone as taught in earlier lessons is 电话 or diàn huà
This course makes little sense and gets even more confusing as the sentences get longer.
Yeah, with some of these I don't agree with the choice of English it uses.
Yes that's probably always going to be the limitation to this kind of programme. I've had it marked wrong when to me it was clearly correct. At least they should be able to add options when suggested, though given the flexibility of most languages it's always going to be limited. I report often, but tend to treat it as a game you have to play. It least it helps us appreciate the different ways of expressing the same idea in our own language.
Yes, they should be able to accept multiple other sentences because it is also equally valid. I hope they fix this issue.
I put " I like taking pictures using my phone the most." This should probably be accepted too.
Saying "the" phone sounds awkward in English. It would make sense for it to either be "my phone" or "a phone".
- 134
Hum... not sure about the 'the' before 'most'. Colloquial usage would probably be ok with "I like taking pictures with my phone most", perhaps?
- 174
This English is grammatical but impossible to tell what it means. The favourite way to take photos? The favourite use of the phone?
Wouldn't it actually be better translated in English like "I prefer to take photos with my phone"?
Yeah, I'd like to know which bit of the sentence 最喜欢 applies to. Is it the whole activity of taking photos on a phone that they like the most, vs. say swimming, or reading. Or is it like you say, a preference to use a phone over a DSLR to take photos. Or a preference to use one's phone for taking photos over taking phone calls.
- 174
Another possibility is that the Chinese is as ambiguous as the English, but only someone pretty proficient at both languages could tell us.
I asked a native Chinese colleague who has been living in Australia for 10 years and sometimes does translating work. She says the sentence is ambiguous and could mean either. It depends on the context.
Her suggestion for how to ask about one's favourite use of a phone is 你最喜欢怎么用你的手机？
- 174
I think it's no better or worse than the official English translation. The problem is the official one is quite bad.
Not a native speaker here, but in my opinion, I think you answer is indirectly correct since it does mean the same thing. But it is usually unacceptable in any Duo's courses.
"最喜欢" is often used to put emphasis on the "喜欢" part, not adding a "most" into the translation
I was hoping to find a better translation here than I could do. I guess it’s just a hard sentence to put into English. Especially when you don’t know which parts of the Chinese sentence are important in context.
“I most like using my phone to take pictures.” Good translation but it seems antiquated to put the ‘most’ before the verb.
“I prefer to use a phone to take pictures.” Good sentence and good translation in some contexts ...but we don’t know if we’re comparing with other things or just being superlative in general.
“I like taking pictures with my phone the most.” Is full of compromises to both the English and the Chinese sentences.
...but I can’t quite say I have the best answer myself.
- 174
There are many Duolingo users who clamour for exact 1:1 literal translations. "Wo zui xihuan" -> "I most like" at least keeps them happy I suppose -:
Apart from that, this sentence might just be ambiguous. I'd have to hear from a native Chinese speaker to know.
- 1516
Like many of the exercises in the Chinese course, this one does not accept many alternative English translations. This really needs mire work.
I'm not a native english speaker (Japanese is my first language), and I already speak chinese. I'm just doing this to keep up with it, and learning Chinese through English is actually a lot easier. But I'm having far more difficult time with English. The criteria of correct answers seem to be very narrow.
"What I like most is taking pictures with the cell phone." Sounds quite natural and that us how I would translate from the Chinese into English.
- 1053
In English, we would say something like "I prefer to take pictures with my phone." "I prefer using my phone to take pictures." We probably wouldn't use "the most" construction at all.
- 209
As a Brit failing ten times to find a translation that convinces Duolingo that i really like using a smartphone camera I wonder if there is another way to deal with the broad issue of translation in this program. Adding vast numbers of alternative translations to the database is not the answer. Many textbooks include a literal translation as well as a grammatical or colloquial one and it maybe that allowing the user to add "(lit)" after a translation would help reduce the error rate.
- 564
And just to add another translation that's not currently accepted: "I most like using a mobile phone for photography." (Yes I know it's stilted English...)
- 209
Duolingo never uses the indefinite article - does anyone know why? This exercise makes a false and unnatural presumption of possession. There is an implied comparison between using a phone and a camera in the sentence and this requires use of the indefinite article in the English translation. Does 'a' always require 一个?
I would have thought "I mostly like using my phone to take photos" would be correct ?
I wrote "i enjoy taking photos with phone the most" but was marked wrong, in other questions 喜欢 was translated to enjoy ..
They mean the same thing: taking pictures. I find 拍照 sounds more casual and 照相 slightly more formal.
"I like taking pictures most using the phone". Not very elegant, I suppose, but I don't think it should be wrong. I do agree though with the comments elsewhere that it's impossible to cover all options.
Seeing that so many possible English translations are all rejected is quite frustrating and annoying (I wrote "I enjoy taking pictures by phone the most", probably not the best English, but at least I understood the Chinese sentence ...).
How is the superlative "the most" indicated in Chinese? What is the difference between saying something is something you enjoy and the one thing you enjoy the most?
- 174
Putting 最 zui4 before something turns it into a superlative so 我喜欢X is "I enjoy X" and 我最喜欢 is "I enjoy X the most". 最喜欢 is also the usual way to translate English "favourite".
- 1665
It's too complicated to guess which EXACT translation will be accepted by Duo. Where is "MY phone"?
- 759
Just another example of the narrow acceptance of answers, it won't take: "I like to use cellphone to take photos the most".
Although this is more correctly what is said in Chinese. 用 = Use.
- 759
In every other example before in the lessons 用 means USE, or USING.
So the answer should be (if you were at all consistent):
" I like using cell phone (手机) to take pictures the most".
Wrong: "I like taking pictures with a cell phone the most." Difference "the phone" is correct, "a cell phone" is incorrect. The characters for a cell phone are present. My answer was...too precise or something?
- 152
This should be accepted. «I like taking photos with the telephone the most». Can you explain to me why it is not accepted ?
Ha ha ha - The program does not smart enough to accept my answers in English: " I like taking pictures using my phone the most." "I like to use cell phone to take pictures the most" "The most, I like using cell phone to take pictures" It force me to cut and paste the most right one "I like taking pictures with the phone the most."
"I like best..." should be accepted for 最喜欢 as an alternative to the awkward "the most" phrases
More naturally it would probably become "i prefer taking pictures with my/a phone"
- 362
"I enjoy taking pictures with phone the most." – wrong answer! Must be "the" phone, the one certain phone! I must say, the more i learn Chinese, the more i lose my English.
手机 is definitely cellphone, but phone should be secondary and also correct rather than cellphone marked incorrect. Source: my Chinese husband and MIL. It's a hand machine, you can't carry others around, so this one definitely should have "cellphone" as an acceptable answer.
- 373
'I like most taking pictures with my phone.' Incorrect. I even used 'pictures' rather than 'photos'. Duo does not like 'photos' for some reason.
Is this like Beetlejuice saying, "I'm the ghost with the most babe." or 'The hostess with the mostest'? -est as a superlative suffix.
"Using phone" is ungrammatical in English. It has to be 'a phone', 'the phone', or 'my phone'.
