"这个故事不是真的。"
Translation:This story isn't true.
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This sentence has an uncanny melody to it. Something like 'AB CD CD AB'. I love it! Zhège gùshì bùshì zhēn de. :)
Thanks for the translation in Pinyin :) I can speak but can't read/write and it takes me a solid 10 to figure out what a sentence is trying to say without Pinyin. I wish duo would get Chinese out of Beta and add Pinyin.
Just a heads up to remind you that Google Translate is not the best tool to study the actual tones of pinyin... In your example I have already spotted the error in bùshì.
不 usually has the fourth tone (falling tone) when it is used on its own. E.g. 不好
However, the tone CHANGES when the word that follows 不 is a fourth tone word. You will have to read 不 with a second tone (rising tone). Examples: 不要、不錯、不是、不再、不認識。
In your case, 不是 should be bu (/) shi ().
As said above, addition of Pinyin would be extremely useful in teaching of these tonal rules
I agree.
In addition, when looking up 不 in a dictionary like the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (现代汉语词典), you will find it under bù, not bú, and there is a notice telling you to change the tone before a falling tone character. So in the dictionary 不对 and 不是 are annotated with bùduì and bùshì respectively, but pronounced as búduì and búshì, and from this prospective both annotated pinyin and pronunciation provided by Google Translate are correct.
PS: I find it may be a little bit like Japanese particles – は, を and へ are pronounced as ha, wo and he respectively, while as particles they are pronounced as wa, o and e.
@DariusLee3 Thank you for pointing that out. It was indeed careless of me not to notice the wrong tone mark before posting the transliteration. Perhaps it was also the excitement about the lyrical sentence that made me ignore it.
If you're on a computer (as opposed to a phone, say), Zhongwen Chinese Popup Dictionary is a good browser extension that allows you to hover your mouse pointer over a character and see the pronunciation as well as the translation.
For phones and other mobile devices I use and recommend the Hanping Dictionary and Hanping Popup apps, which function together to do the same sort of thing. (There are others but I like these ones.)
Glad it was helpful. :) I generally use Google Translate whenever the audio isn't very clear and I need to refer to Pinyin. There are also quite a few extensions (I use Chrome) for converting Hanzi to Pinyin.
It would certainly make the course a bit easier if they added Pinyin but considering the amount of time and effort it would take to do that and the fact that we are already taught Pinyin for every single character introduced, the idea doesn't seem worthwhile to me. Happy learning!
I think, as the translation Duo provides, it is the same. But it would be the difference of saying (with 的 in the end) that the history your friend is telling is the false version and saying (without 的) that a fable is not a true history. About 是, it seems to me it is a matter of choice, but not sure. Putting 很 would change the sentence to being a characteristic of that story, to being a state of it. Like it would only require (with 很) minor corrections to be true. In other words, something like "it is not true yet", where yet would be implicit.
This is not a true story. Is perfectly correct.... When will you see it???
It seems as though that should be a possibility, though I'd be interested in a native speaker's take on the difference in nuance between "真的" and "真实的" in this context.
I'm still a little confused by the use of de at the end of sentences. I understand it's use to indicate posession but this seems different
A general notion to be aware of is that "的" attaches an attribute to a noun, but we can drop the noun, and then we get something like "one with attribute X".
For example, "蓝色" is "blue color", which we can take as an attribute. "蓝色的车" is "blue car", i.e. "car with the attribute of blueness", but if we already know that we're talking about a car, we can drop "车", in which case we get "蓝色的", i.e. "a/the blue (one)". It doesn't matter where this phrase goes in the sentence. It can be the subject or the object, and it can come at the beginning or the end, e.g. "蓝色的不快" ("the blue one isn't fast") or "我喜欢蓝色的" ("I like the blue one").
"真的" is a little different, however, as it's taken on a life of its own, and can act as either an adverb ("really/truly") or an adjective/attributive ("real/true").
As an adjective/attributive it tends to appear after "是" as a complement to (and attribute of) the subject, as in the current Duolingo sentence, which can be interpreted as "This story is not a true one".
But unlike other attributives of similar form, it's not really used as a subject, because at the beginning of the sentence (i.e. before the verb) it sounds like an adverb, and its adverbial use is very common. Instead, "真 X 的" can be used as a subject, where "X" is some other word/character that provides nuance and clarity.
"This story is untrue" was rejected. Surely if the story is not true it is untrue??
I would say it's a possibility but I wouldn't say it makes more sense.
In my understanding the Chinese would typically be used to express a simple judgement about the truth of the story, rather than, for example, whether it was particularly fantastical, and it's commonplace in English to use "true" in this way.
That's not quite what the Chinese says. That would be "这个故事是假的".