"El año mil setecientos veinte."
Translation:The year seventeen twenty.
35 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
Duo generally accepts numerals when you're writing in English, but not in Spanish. It makes sense if you think about it, because they are trying to teach us how to say/write Spanish numbers and just typing '1720' doesn't really teach us anything or demonstrate that we've learned how to say 'mil setecientos veinte'. But when we're typing in English, they assume we know English numbers already so just using numerals is fine.
2806
If it's an audio recognition question then "1720" should arguably be accepted regardless.
2806
If you hear and understand it in audio form then there's a higher chance you already know how to spell it out in full, especially since Spanish orthography is pretty easy and consistent. Your argument makes sense for the other exercise types, but in a pure audio transcription exercise you would typically expect that the numeric form would work, since that's the standard way of writing it. I'd say it's more important to build an association between the pronunciation and the number form than with the word form. You could still get your spelling practice in the other types of exercises.
But anyway, that's why I said "arguably".
By preceding this number with "el año" we are saying this is a year. In English we don't typically name the years as normal numbers and that's what this example is trying to teach. In Spanish they use normal numbers while we don't typically do that in English. I've never heard anyone say the US gained it's independence in the year one thousand seven-hundred seventy-six. We usually divide the four digit year into two halves and say each number that way, 1776 becomes 17(seventeen) 76(seventy-six). 1984 becomes 19(nineteen) 84(eighty-four). it's weird because from 2000-2009 it was two thousand then number, but now for the most part people say twenty twenty and not two thousand twenty.
In English it's common to look at long numbers and years like "1720" as "17" + "20" and pronounce it as "seventeen twenty"; it's much easier to say than "one-thousand seven-hundred and twenty" after all. But in Spanish they don't break it in half like that; they always use the more precise/longer phrasing. So it's mil (one-thousand) setecientos (seven-hundred) veinte (twenty).
"seventeen twenty" is part of the default answer so if it was marked wrong it probably wasn't directly related to those words. Either you had a typo somewhere else, or maybe the app wanted you to copy the Spanish instead of writing in English; otherwise it was just a random glitch which you could try reporting if it happens again (if you can capture a screenshot of an issue like that you can send it in as a bug report). It usually helps to copy-paste your entire sentence into your comment if you can, so we (your fellow users) can do a better job of trying to help figure out the issue.
590
In English we rarely say thousand when we talk about years. For example, World War Two started in nineteen thirty-nine, not in one thousand nine hundred and thirty-nine. Because there is currently no one hundred in the years it is probably more common to hear two thousand nineteen than twenty nineteen.