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I've seen these two sentences on Duolingo:

我们都是老师。 (We are all teachers.)

他们对不是美国人。 (None of them are American.) (Not sure if this was exactly the one that I was supposed to translate...)

But the second one can also be written as

他们都不是美国人。

So what's the difference between 都 and 对?

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  • I think you meant 才, but you confused it with 材, and then made a typo, used the simplified character for對 instead
    – Tang Ho
    May 10, 2019 at 22:25
  • 1
    他们对不是美国人. simply not a valid sentence. with unknown meaning. May 11, 2019 at 0:53

2 Answers 2

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I've been learning Chinese for 12 years and I don't think I've seen 对 used in that way before. However, the「对不是」 could be a typo of 「绝对不是」 "certainly not". So, maybe it could be this:

我们都不是美国人。
None of us are American.

我们绝对不是美国人。
We're definitely not American.

Hope that helps.

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  • "Definitely" is fine, but I think "absolutely" is a slightly better translation of “绝对.”
    – Marko
    Aug 13, 2019 at 2:31
  • @Marko that would certainly be appropriate in many situations, but of course without a context, it's hard to say
    – kGdmioT
    Aug 29, 2019 at 10:47
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'他们对不是美国人。 ' is a wrong sentence. the right one is '他们都不是美国人。'

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