"L'étagère est belle."
Translation:The shelf is beautiful.
18 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
1744
Its a bookshelf too - but that answer is not accepted! - oh dear, yet again guessing the correct English translation
Added, thanks. Please report any missing translations or problems that you find. With this many new sentences, there will be some with missing translations. Thanks! https://www.duolingo.com/comment/26750687
- 1405
'The shelf is beautiful' is a fairly rare usage: but the more commonly encountered 'great', which is offered in the drop-down options is marked incorrect. How many 'beautiful' shelves does one encounter? If 'great' (!) is wrong, then I think this is a poor choice of words.
Why not? It's probably not the shelf itself, but the things on it and how they're arranged and presented.
- This shelf of antique figurines is beautiful!
- This shelf is beautiful!
The drop down hints are not supposed to work in every sentence. You have to chose a translation that has the right meaning in both languages.
On the other hand, if it is offered as a hint, then there would have to be a good reason for it to be marked incorrect.
If the shelf can be "beautiful," I do not see why it cannot also be "great."
Of course the root problem is that the sentence offered isn't very natural, and this is always going to lead people to come up with varied translations to fit.
Was your answer marked incorrect and did you report it? "The shelf is great" is one of the correct translations.
The word "etagere", meaning a piece of furniture with shelving for displaying things, has been successfully absorbed into English. Can you add it to the list?
pretty = joli/jolie
beautiful = belle/beau
Just like in English there is a nuanced difference between these words in French. "Belle" is typically much stronger than "jolie".
Nice doesn't have an exact translation in French. Here it depends. When talking about things, nice can be translated as either belle or jolie. When discussing people, gentil(le) or aimable are close synonyms.
I think that would be closer in meaning to "jolie", and CommeuneTexane already explained the difference between that and "belle".
