"She eats bread."
Translation:Lei mangia il pane.
44 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
As someone who has learnt French before, I'm going to tell everyone that you're going to need to get used to the definitive article being used in a lot more places than it is in English.
Sadly, Duolingo seems to sometimes only accept translations in English with the "the" or without "the" exclusively--never both--making it confusing for learners.
"Il" and "lo" are both masculine articles. "Il" is used in most cases when the word begins with a consonant. However, if the word begins with s + a consonant, gn, pn, ps, x, y, or z, then you use "lo." And then "l'" is used for words that begin with vowels. Again, this is only for MASCULINE words. Feminine is easier in my opinion. "La" is used for most words, and then "l'" is used for words that begin with a vowel. Hope this helps :)
It's one form of the masculine determinate article. Check this useful post by TomSFox: www.duolingo.com/comment/1055925
Can you answer the original question - why is ''the'' missing from the English sentence if we are required to put it in the Italian? Why are we expected to guess what you mean? ''She eats bread'' and ''She eats the bread'' have slightly different meanings in English either bread in general or a piece of bread in particular.
"Mangi" is 2nd person informal singular of the present (you eat) and 2nd person formal singular of the imperative, but I'd advise you to ignore that until the lesson on Formal You, because duolingo doesn't accept it in all instances. You can check the whole conjugation table on http://www.italian-verbs.com/italian-verbs/conjugation.php?verbo=mangiare; it uses the traditional pronouns (egli=lui, essi=they), so ignore them too.
Mangi is for you (2° person of the singular) Mangio is for myself (1° person of the singular) and mangia is the equivalent of eats (3° person of the singular). All of the three are in present simple, it's the easiest one. The "passato remoto" of the verb mangiare (to eat) is:
IO mangiai TE mangiasti EGLI mangió NOI mangiammo VOI mangiaste ESSI mangiarono
My complaint is not about the verb. The sentence to be translated was ''She eats bread'' but ''Lei mangia pane'' was marked wrong. It should have been ''Lei mangia il pane'' ''She eats THE bread'' so why wasn't that sentence given? The two sentences might mean the same in Italian but they don't in English and surely your students need to understand exactly what you are saying if they are to learn language.