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- "Today is beautiful."
"Today is beautiful."
Translation:Nani kēia lā.
16 Comments
2224
Can someone please clarify why "He nani i keia la" is not correct. And more to the point, when do you use "he" and when not?
I had "He nani kēia lā." and it was also wrong. Hovering the "is" it says "he" and below that "untranslated". I was wondering why, but then, on another comment page, it said, that the "he" is used, when the English sentence has an "a":
Today is a beautiful day. = He lā nani kēia lā.
Today is beautiful. = Nani kēia lā.
Actually, from previous excercises I was under the impression that "he" was "is, are", but it turnes out it means "a, an".
As for the "i", the dictionary says it is a marker for a direct or indirect object, and can be translated as "To, towards, at, in, on, by, because of, for, due to, by means of".
If you think of "i kēia lā" as "today (on this day)" and of "kēia lā" as "today (this day)", that works:
Today (this day) is beautiful. = Nani kēia lā.
Today (on this day) it is beautiful. = Nani i kēia lā.
Or, why not just "Nani i kēia lā"? Why not use the "i" in Today? Mahalo.
- 184
I thought the same. When I also got it wrong, I figured maybe because it's ... now I can't rationalize it (why not with "i" or with "he" (or both))! Can someone pls help :) ?
- 223
The "i" is one of the ways to add additional information to an already "complete" sentence with a subject and a predicate. In many sentences in this lesson we use "i kēia lā" to add additional information--namely, that the weather patterns we are talking about are happening "today". "Anuanu ka anilā... i kēia lā" = "The weather is cold...today".
In this sentence however, "today" IS the subject, not additional information. So you can't mark it with "i". "Nani i kēia lā" is like saying "On this day.... is beautiful." What is beautiful? Removing the "i" makes "kēia lā" into the subject of the sentence.
I stand corrected. According to Pukui and Elbert nani is used for things. U'i for people.
As far as I can tell, word order is not relaxed in Duolingo Hawaiian. The owl does not relax.
I speak a bit of te reo Māori and the word order should be fairly the same, but on Duolingo the way some sentences are set up make no sense to me. I even asked my Hawaiian friends and they said it's understandable, but it sounds odd and unnatural, like overly grammatical.
'O is mostly a marker for proper nouns. As "today" in Hawai'ian is literally "this day," it doesn't need it.
Maybe duolingo isn't made to learn a language, but to practice a language I'm already learning - that's what I come to think. I will probably stop with Hawaiian, since I can't see a sense behind the grammar they use. Just learning by try and error, mainly error...I am tired of not being able to understand the sense. It is not easy to skip this, but I am not proceeding. I was curious about the language. They have to give more grammatical advice.
Why would " U'i kēia lā" be wrong? Uʻi and nani seem to be interchangeable, so why mark it wrong?
- 182
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