I saw someone discuss how they always mix up a sentence on Duolingo. “Which is it?” and the answer is 「それはどれですか？」and for some reason this phrase seem really weird to me.
“That is which?”
People in comments didn’t seem to think much of it but is this really something you can/would say? When would you use it?
I feel like just「どれですか？」seems better.
どれですか sound better to me idk why.
If i am guessing それはどれですか might sound natural to japanese beginners since they can’t usually understand “subject is usually omitted” part
That (you talking about) which is it?
I could be wrong
I feel like I’ve heard それはどれですか before used as a space filler, like the speaker is trying to remember which one it is.
For whatever that’s worth, my (non-native) intuition is that both sound fine.
Glad to see I’m not the only one who was like “hmm… this feels weird but I don’t know why”
Wouldn’t this be fine given some context though? Like if someone asked you to pick that up あれをひろいてくれ。but maybe you didn’t understand what あれ was referring to so you might ask それはどれですか？while looking at a group of things on the ground.
Using それ because you are referring to the あれ mentioned by the other party right?
Yeah, I could see that.
BTW, 拾う’s て-form is ひろって
Indeed! Thanks for catching that!
I realize that this thread is a bit old, but I’d like to toss in some additional information.
Richard Webb, the author of 80/20 Japanese recommends redefining how the particle は is expressed in English. は is the topic marker, but in English we don’t often refer to topics directly, usually only referring to the subject. For a sentence like 「これは何ですか？」, translating は as ‘is’ to get the sentence “what is this?” is acceptable since it does get the meaning across properly, but it does oversimplify what is actually going on. After all, in the Japanese sentence, ‘this’ is marked as the topic, whereas in the English translation it is actually a subject, and this causes problems in some other translations. Richard suggests instead defining は as something along the lines of “When talking about…”, which, while more cumbersome and unnatural in English, more accurately follows the Japanese grammar. With this in mind your example sentence, 「それはどれですか？」, now translates to “When talking about that/those, which?”, which is much closer to the true meaning of the original Japanese sentence.
If you’ve got 80/20 Japanese yourself, the section on how は best translated into English is on page 302 if you’d like more detail and examples.