This isn’t the first time it happened. But It’s the first time it made me want to make a topic about it.
And sure, there’s a different word/kanji for (uncooked) rice. But there are also multiple words for emotion, change, food, etc. lots of other multiple usage words/kanji’s. So if ご飯 can also, in a broader spectrum, be used to simply talk about rice. (at the very least in beginner friendly japanese) than why count it as wrong.
When I’m talking about having rice for lunch/dinner, I never specify it as cooked, as it would be obvious that it will be.
Yeah I understand where WK is coming from, ご飯 is very specifically about the cooked rice served with a meal, so important in Japanese culture that the word is literally just used to mean meal
But also it’s absolutely asinine, rice is very much the correct answer. For a language where context matters, in conversation you aren’t gonna mix up ご飯 and 米, you know full well what is meant by rice in both contexts
Hell, English doesn’t even differentiate between the two and we also know what is meant
It’s true we sometimes miss adding translations used in our context sentences as accepted meanings for the word. Whenever people point this out, we’re always sure to add it.
That said, this case is a bit of a weird one. I agree with you and @pembo here that it makes sense for “rice” to be an accepted answer in context (i.e., knowing that it refers to cooked rice and is different than 米), so it would make sense to add it to the user synonyms for the word. But I’ll bring this to the content team to see if we want to accept rice as an answer or change that context sentence to be more clear.
It’s definitely objectively true that the rice is cooked, the question on this one would just be if asking for that is too much of an awkward specific type of phrasing because in English you just say rice for all situations, cooked or uncooked.
This is an interesting example to me because my mother language (Persian) has a similar distinction, albeit more precisely between rice in general and cooked rice. If I was evaluating someone’s comprehension of Persian, I would only take as descriptively correct an answer that made this explicit. The fact that this distinction is lexically absent in English doesn’t mean it can be overlooked in a different language.
i.e. if someone I’m testing tells me the word for “cooked rice” means “rice”, I myself have no way of knowing that they know it means cooked rice. So by default, this would be a wrong answer because it is underspecified. But if you were evaluating yourself, and you found it more convenient to just say rice while knowing you mean cooked rice specifically, you could mark yourself as right.
I think it makes sense then to allow users to add rice as a synonym and trust that they know what’s going on, but not to have it accepted by default to ensure the distinction is noticed…
Not sure what you mean by self evaluation of word knowledge.
But like I said in the first post. Gohan is often used, in beginner friendly japanese, to simply describe rice. And when talking about the edible version you’d still just calls in rice in english.
Sure. But on the flip side, if it really means “cooked rice”, and you learn it as “rice” because that’s how you’d more naturally say it in English, there’s a danger that you’re not learning the proper nuance.
Answering with “cooked rice” is the only way for WK to confirm you understand the difference… it can’t read your mind.
You are absolutely right about that. But I am being marked wrong when it is exactly correct in every way. Believe me, I check my mistakes to see where the mistake is so I don’t do it again.
I know lots of stuff get lost in translation. And “All” might not be the best translation for the vocab. But for the love of all that is holy don’t give so many examples when you count it as wrong anyways…
Thinking more about it it would be a bit awkward as an answer because “at all” only has the right meaning when it’s part of a negative, like “no X at all”, “to not X at all”.
