"客人在客厅喝茶。"
Translation:The guest drinks tea in the living room.
24 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
I think there is nothing wrong with it. Who says Guests drink tea in the living room?
"The guests are drinking tea in the living room." Your version changes the emphasis.
While it changes the emphasis in English, the Chinese would be the same.
619
"The guest is in the the living room drinking tea" Still marked wrong as of 2019-07-04. Reported.
Very unnatural English...again, distracting from the mission of learning Chinese...
Again. I notice a lot of repetition in this lesson. Seems to be a characteristic of the later lessons.
- 2608
"Guests have tea in the living room" How do I know when I should have a definite article "the" or not?
- 1344
If 客人在客厅喝茶 = "The guest drinks tea in the living room", then how would you say "The guest in the living room drinks tea" in Chinese?
In the first case, it answers where the guest does the action of drinking tea. The second case just points out that specifically the guest located in the living room (not any other guests elsewhere) drinks tea in general (as opposed to coffee or anything else).
It is not lounge room. Just lounge. If you accept that in one sentence, accept it here too. Grumble.
The guest is having tea in the living room. Thid sgiukd be correct too right?
If English can make a grammatical distinction between "The guest drinks tea in the living room" and the "The guest is drinking tea in the living room" then so should Chinese. My understanding is that the verb by itself is the present habitual 'drinks', and needs something like ‘在' to make it progressive. Am I wrong with this?
Yes and no. You're studying German, so you know that "the guest drinks" and "the guest is drinking" are both "der Gast trinkt", and there's no present progressive tense. It's the same in French, though there are different constructions that can make it clear that the aspect is progressive, if necessary.
Likewise in Chinese, the bare verb may or may not refer to a continuing action, depending on the context. Also, there's already a "在" in this sentence, and to me it would be weird to add another, but I have to defer to native Chinese speakers on this.
You could use "喝着茶" ("hēzhechá") to express "drinking tea", but I'd like to hear from a native speaker as to whether this would be necessary or natural-sounding.
The present imperfect tense would make a better translation, i.e. "The guest is drinking tea in the living room." It suggests that the guest is currently drinking tea in the living room.
"The guest drinks tea in the living room" sounds awkward in English because one would only say that to indicate that the guest prefers to drink tea in the living room instead of some other room.
It's not awkward if you think of it as a response to "Where does the guest drink tea?"
I put lounge, and it was refused. What's the difference between living room and lounge ?
In the version of North American English that I speak, a "living room" is typically found in a home, whereas a "lounge" is a similar type of space in a public place and may or may not be associated with amenities such as food and drink.
But if you have a large house with two similar rooms that you want to distinguish from one another, you might call one a living room and one a lounge, with the lounge more likely to be a place where you intend to relax with and entertain guests. The design of a living room is usually more intimately specific to the various needs of the family, whereas a lounge has a more generic design for more public use and may or may not be more showy.