"现在差一刻五点。"
Translation:It's a quarter to five now.
47 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
445
Yes. It's so annoying that they still haven't fixed the totally reduntant "now" in these sentences.
46
According to Google Ngram Viewer, "It's quarter past" has overtaken "It's a quarter past" in frequency of usage in British English in the last 15 years or so, and is also becoming more common in American English. "It's quarter to" still trails "It's a quarter to" in usage frequency, but not by a very wide margin. So "It's quarter to five now" definitely should be accepted.
https://bit.ly/2FbApB8 (click on "Search lots of books" to generate the graph)
My knowledge of the Chinese language isn't good enough to comment on whether or not the "now" is necessary in this sentence.
1149
"It's quarter to five now" is accepted. I would never say it with the "a". Canadian here.
Duolingo Lacks flexibility! Just realized that and don't quibble. They take away your hearts and you need Hearts to play... So use the practice modes on one's you finished and they will reward you with hearts and with experience points. And it's free and it's really awfully good. It's a computer program. You can learn fundamentals and you can learn characters in grammatical utterances. Wow!
1714
The radical meaning of 差 is "difference". When something is "bad", its difference from the standard is being noticed, and thus 差 is extended to "bad". It would need some comparative words to mean "worse".
我今年成绩很差/My results are bad this year.
拿个B 也没差/There's no difference getting a B.
我一直拿A 的!差很多了!/I used to get A! It's much worse now!
I for one think the now is absolutely necessary (现在). You don't want to just translate every sentence into "perfect" English because then you will just be relying on rote memory rather than actually understanding the characters and the Chinese sentence structure. I actually wished duolingo allowed more "dirty" English rather than sometimes requiring one commonplace Chinese phrase to be translated into the similar commonplane English phrase. Just because they're often said in the same context in each culture doesn't mean they hold the same meaning!
1714
This is very sensible and inspiring for language learning, and deserves a lingot. In English we use the impersonal It to tell the time but such structure is much less used in Chinese. If someone says this without "now", it would become a bit difficult to tell what he's talking about, unless we already knew Time is the topic.