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- Topic: Swahili >
- "Kunyweni maji safi na salama"
10 Comments
What's wrong with "You all drink clean and safe water." Yeah, it's unnatural English, but it's what Duolingo has been insisting. Yet again, we are all so disgusted that no one has complained about the translation of this sentence.
I can say that I have gone through and reported just about everything at least once with whatever occurred to me. There used to be an option to write something in the error reports too and that was much more useful, but they've gotten rid of that.
I'm not sure what plans they have for this course. I don't know that there's a point in reporting, since it currently has no contributors
We can hope for a change with the inconsistency in requiring us to write "You all" for "you" (pl) some places and not others. It's actually only appropriate to say it like that when you're duplicating a US southern dialect of English. Maybe there are parts of Australia, NZ or SA where they say it too, but I'm not aware. DL will need to get around to accepting a simple "you" for both sing. and pl. like they do in the lessons for many of their other language courses. I'm concerned with the stilted or awkward translation they give here. One doesn't say, "Drink clean and safe water" without risking redundancy. In 99% of contexts for expressing this meaning, one would say something else, for example, "Drink clean water and be safe!...or. "If you want to be safe, drink clean water."
Agreed. Having spent quite a bit of time in Tanzania over the past 17 years, I am quite familiar with the language. I have been taking the course to become more fluent, but do not understand the inconsistencies in several instances. That said, the price is right and I have other books and a dictionary to assist in my learning.
