"Ben baykuşum ama yakışıklıyım."
Translation:I am an owl, but I am handsome.
31 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
I guess I'll weigh in on this one. "I am an owl but handsome" is certainly comprehensible English, but not very idiomatic. Omitting the "I am" after "but" seems to me to weaken the statement being made in the second half of the sentence by making it so short. Better weight and balance are achieved by repeating the "I am" in the second half, as is done in the model translation. If you want an alternative, I would suggest "I am an owl, but a handsome one." This is not exactly what the Turkish says, but it's credible as a piece of English.
I might also note that, if I were an owl, I might resent the implication that owls were not generally handsome: Baykuşların çok yakışıklı olduğunu düşünüyorum!
I dont think, so in this case, but its only a language-feeling (i am german), maybe a native speaker can confirm or say its wrong: but I guess its like this: you can leave out the second "I am" if in the first and second part of the sentence, the same kind of words are used, i.e. nouns or adjevtives. You can say "I am dirty but beautiful" or "I am an actor, not a singer" (I just realized that its difficult to build a sentence like this with two nouns and 'but'!?. ). But I think you have to repeat "I am" if its first a noun and than an adjective you are claimimg "to be". "I am a politician but I am incorruptible". :)
Hi, mnydt. "I am an owl but handsome" is not the most standard, normal English you could use. It was probably marked wrong for this reason. In this example, there are two clauses separated by "but"/"ama": "[clause1] but [clause2]." Your proposed solution has clause1 ("I am an owl"), but in place of clause2, you just have an adjective, not a full clause. If you had also included "I am" in front of "handsome," your answer probably would have been accepted. If you'd prefer an answer a little less straightforward than "I am an owl, but I am handsome," you could try "I am an owl, but a handsome one." I'm not sure if it's accepted. I'm also glad I'm not an owl, for if I were, I might take offense at the suggestion that owls are generally not handsome!
"I am owl" is wrong in English because owl is countable and a determiner must be brought before the noun. In Turkish, it is not necessary to bring a determiner before a noun. However, when translating the sentence into English, bringing a determiner before a countable noun is a must. Of course, you don't want to destroy English, do you? :D
baykuşum / I am an owl
baykuştur / he, she, it is an owl
if you use the web version you have access to tips and notes where you can read about suffixes to express "to be"
https://www.duolingo.com/skill/tr/To-be/tips-and-notes
That's quite often the case I find. The reason given by the mod's is that the audio is computer-generated and so not always entirely accurate and they can do nothing about it. To view the problem in a positive light when listening to everyday speech in Turkey the words will not always be spoken clearly and as we develop our understanding of the language we'll be able to better pick up the clues and fill in the gaps in a sensible way.
Hello, sheetalver. Statements like "I am owl" or "She is doctor" may be intelligible -- their meaning may be clear -- but they are examples of things that English speakers would never say. Such statements are often called "ungrammatical." I'm sure you can think of expressions in your language that might make sense, but are "wrong" in the sense that no native speaker would say them. Such is the case with the two examples above. To make them grammatical, we need to add articles. For instance, "I am an owl" and "She is a doctor" are things that English speakers might actually say, though the first one is admittedly unusual! Note that it's "an owl" (rather than "a owl") because "owl" begins with a vowel. Other examples: "an elephant" or "an excellent story," versus "a day at the beach" or "a good example."
As you may well know, "a" (or "an") is what is known as the indefinite article in English, while "the" is the definite article. There are a few cases when statements of the form 'X is Y' (where X and Y are nouns) would not require an article before 'Y' (e.g., "flattery is deceit," or "sharing is caring"). But if you want to say that the subject of your sentence is a member of a particular class or group, you should use the English indefinite article: "She is an astronaut," "He is a teacher," "I am an owl" -- or actually, in my case, a frog!