"Hanno suonato alla porta."
Translation:They rang at the door.
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Suonato is played in the musical instrument sense (past participle), Giocato means played in the children sense of the word.
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I put 'They played at the door' in, just for fun, and it is accepted. I suppose one could image that they played instruments of some sort at the door....
"They rung the doorbell" has been shown as an alternative answer. Is this a very colloquial term or common place?
When a sentence like this appears I want to work out whether I need to remember the strange meaning or simply the standard translation.
It should be 'They rang the doorbell' or 'They have rung the doorbell'. You do hear people say 'They rung...' but it's not standard English.
For what it's worth, I hear this frequently in Rome, Milan, etc., when someone "rings" the entry control system (cancello). In AE, the equivalents are multiple.: "Someone's at the door," "Hey, Edith! They rang at the door," or merely, "They rang the door." (with other words implied).
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This seems like an idiom to me and not something I was otherwise not able to translate accurately. But I suppose I will remember this one now!
Here DL accepts the word 'doorbell' as a more natural, paraphrasing translation. What gets me is that there is no consistency about this and you never know how literal you should be.
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what throws me on a loop here is the word porta, which means door, so my brain wants to say they have knocked on the door, but alas, Duo thinks it should be doorbell, even when my Oxford dictionary translates doorbell as campanello and that word is nowhere to be seen in this exercise.
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The English translations in this unit drop the "have" left and right. In fact, most of the time they do. So why now, on this one, does it demand the "have"?! English speakers often drop the have in this tense. Here, I did it to try to conform.
There's no such thing as "dropping the have" in English: they're different tenses altogether, they just happen to both match the Italian 'passato prossimo'. I ring, I rang, I have rung: if you wrote "I have rang", that's a grammar mistake (https://data.grammarbook.com/blog/definitions/ring-vs-rang-vs-rung/)
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My answer "they rang at the door" was accepted. I wouldn't have risked a heart to add "doorbell"!!
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Poor translation I must say Suona makes reference to the a going of playing musical instruments
Who are they? Wouldn't it be better to say: "Somebody has rung the bell?"
Who are they? I believe in English you may say Someone rang the doorbell and not they.
When I put this as the answer to " he rang the doorbell " it was marked wrong, with the answer including the word ' campanello ' (a bell). Can't remember exact details. Why introduce an idiomatic phrase and then penalise for learning it!!?
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In a previous exercise we were given "Hanno suonato il campanello" (They have rung the doorbell).
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They have rung the bell, I think, should be considered correct! Few people say the doorbell!
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So far, the present perfect and the simple past (preterite) have been used completely interchangeably in this section. So why on earth not here?!
They (have knocked or) knocked on the door ??? is it a doorbell or a door?