I was doing my duolingo of the day and the sentence was 저랑 야옹 씨는 서점에서 독서해요 but when I translated it as "I and Kitty are reading at the bookstore" it was wrong and told me it should be "Kitty and I are reading at the bookstore." Why is this? Cause 저 means I right? So shouldnt that one be first?
Duolingo is dinging you for your English grammar, not your understanding of Korean.
Even though that’s the way it’s written in the Korean, I would personally say Kitty and I is a better translation because we tend to put the other party first in English for politeness reasons. I and Kitty just sounds odd. It’s more important to sound natural in a language you’re translating to than to match word for word exactly.
But then again Duolingo is just not great for learning Korean anyway, so maybe I’m overestimating the amount of thought they put into that answer.
They put no thought into it bc a machine did it for them
I think you already know or you would have translated it as, "I and Kitty at the bookstore are reading." But you didn't because you realize that translating word for word with the same word order would be wrong. Translate meaning, not individual words.
Your translation is correct, it's just that in English grammar it's always written as "___ & I," not "I & ___."
The lesson I learned while lurking on r/Korean and other language-related subs is that duolingo is shit.
I was about to say the 1st mistake was using Duolingo lol.
This isn’t a Korean grammar issue, it’s an English style rule.
In Korean, 저랑 야옹 씨는 is perfectly fine. Korean does not care about the order of “I” and the other person. You can say 저랑 야옹 씨 or 야옹 씨랑 저, and both are natural depending on context.
But in English, there’s a strong convention to put the other person first and “I” last.
Duolingo marked it wrong because it’s checking for natural English, not because your understanding of 저 is wrong. 저 absolutely means “I.”
Time to use an other app/website/book.