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Give French word given picture + English word - unclear if le/la/les/un/une needed!
I'm a little sick of getting these questions wrong - where they give you a photo and don't give you any options to choose determiners from a list - and you don't know whether a determiner is needed or not.
They ask you to translate "wallet", for example, and then when you write un portefeuille it's marked wrong, it should be le portefeuille - but in the same exercise when they ask for "shoes" it's "une chaussure" ?!
The worst part is there's no way to signal errors or have a discussion, the only option is to say the picture doesn't match the word.
8 Comments
I understand your frustration. The team is currently going through the image exercises and changing them all to have the definite article where possible. Many of the exercises are very old and predate us. Unfortunately there isn't a fast or systematic way to find them all, so the work is slow. I realize that the report options have been limited, so if you encounter another problem, you can report it here.
Thanks so much! Appreciate all the work from the team :) maybe a faster way would be to change the report options for images?
Determiners are pretty much always needed with nouns but which ones is mostly left up to memorization in french.
A basic noun will take a le/la, plurals les, for "the". "The shoe" This is what you will generally use unless specified otherwise.
Un/une would translate more to "a" or "one". So "A shoe/One shoe"
"Shoes" should not translate to "une chaussure" as 'shoes' is plural and 'une chaussure' is singular
I think you misunderstood my post, I'm fluent in French and I understand what determiners are for and when to use which one, I'm mostly using Duolingo to keep up with my fluency now that I no longer live in France.
I'm saying that there are errors in the Duolingo tree, typically, they asked for shoes and while I wrote les chaussures, it was marked wrong and the correct answer given was une chaussure; and there is no way in the system to flag the response as wrong for the picture questions.
My main gripe is that I find it inconsistent - for some objects they give you the determinants in English as well, and sometimes they don't, sometimes when you give the determinant in French it's considered wrong if there's no determinant in English, etcetc, I don't see any "rule" to go by in the Duolingo practices.
Ah, yes apologies!
I've seen so many posts from learners who have trouble telling them apart and get frustrated by it that I mistook yours for one of those. I understand now, and definitely agree. :)
You can hit the report button and pick a remark one of which is to say that your answer should be accepted.
Not for the write the word for the image shown questions! The only report option is that the word does not match the image :)
Oh! I guess that is another flaw. There is a lot of content on this website and evidently, it is hard to manage every detail.
