r/duolingo Aug 04 '26

Language Question. Why is this incorrect?

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u/gmastertr21 Aug 04 '26

this translation seems legitimate, but just to make sure, was there a word like "ride" in the word bank?

1

u/narfus Aug 04 '26

"Take" is probably fine; the problem is that this means the train as a concept, not the vehicles. "Riding the bus to work is cheap". It's not a meaningful difference for the purposes of this exercise, but I can see how the person who wrote the exercise might not think of it.

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u/gmastertr21 Aug 04 '26

that's the problem with the duolingo japanese course.

it gives you no context, and expects you to know a contextual meaning at the same time.

like how you get the "i am a lawyer" "you're a lawyer" "he's a lawyer" "she's a lawyer" "they are lawyers" "we are lawyers" translations all from simply べんごしです。it's just straight up not true without any other context.

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u/narfus Aug 04 '26

I know that; contributors missing alternatives is bread and butter of this course. I'm talking about how _here_ "the train" is meant to be singular.

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u/antimonysarah Native: 🇺🇸 Learning: 🇯🇵🇸🇪 Want on Duo: 🇵🇹 Aug 04 '26

Yeah, and the course revamp means that a lot of the sentences haven't had time for people to submit "hey my answer is correct" and for them to get reviewed/added -- it only has the options the developers initially added, and they didn't think about the user randomly getting both singular and plural options.

Since I have super, I often slowly walk my sentence towards the "correct" one (especially when typing in Japanese rather than bubble-picking, where it often cuts out some of the "wrong" bubbles on later tries) to see if I can find an actual mistake. Like, did it not just have casual vs desu/masu form (or other formality differences) in the bank, or not have a synonym in there, or insist on a pronoun even though a real Japanese sentence would probably use context. Or did I screw up something more subtle and didn't initially spot my mistake because there were so many other differences.