"She is taking a shower now."

Translation: 她现在在洗澡。

[TreeTempo]

她正在洗澡？

[KX3.]

This is fine, but take note that 正在 carries the meaning of "she is (doing this) right now".

[BrettNoChinese]

Should 她现在洗澡 be accepted or is the second 在 required?

[KX3.]

It is required.

[Wyatt961236]

It is not required. If they wanted the English to reflect the necessity of the second 在 they should have said, "she's in the shower right now"

[duckmaestro]

What is the grammatical reason for this?

[KX3.]

她在洗澡 = She is taking a shower.

她现在在洗澡 = She is taking a shower now.

现 doesn't mean anything on its own here so it requires 在 to mean "now".

[Gabrielle145359]

她现在洗澡 should be a fine sentence, but the addition of the second 在 changes the verb into its continuous form. This is a difficult topic to explain in English because many other languages (including Mandarin) use the continuous (-ing in English, 在+verb or 正在+verb in Chinese) far less often then English does. English uses -ing forms to discuss presently occurring actions most of the time (at least where I'm from), whereas so many other languages (such as Mandarin) usually DON'T use their equavalent of "-ing" when talking about presently occurring actions.

In this case, Duo wants you to use the continuous form in Chinese (add that 在), but doesn't have a great way to signal that because we are used to translating present continuous (-ing) English sentences into present simple (no 在) Chinese sentences.

[kuyaC]

Is 洗澡 like 跑步, first character a verb and second character a noun?

[jamesjiao]

Yes, you can think of it this way. Normally verbs like this are intransitive.

[Alan946894]

2020.10.6
睡覺 works the same way. They can be broken up

[JeanLim13]

她现在洗澡 Most native speakers would just say this in everyday conversation and drop the additional 在. Duo is not wrong but most people will find 她现在洗澡 accpetable and understand the context. Just a comment

[RobertMood3]

You can also use 洗淋浴 for this sentence