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- "Jeg vil ikke ringe henne på …
"Jeg vil ikke ringe henne på telefonen."
Translation:I do not want to call her on the telephone.
17 Comments
Modal auxiliary verbs such as "vil" and "må" are always followed by a bare infinitive ("ringe"), not a present tense verb ("ringer").
I will not call her on telephone. I got this wrong. Can someone please tell me why?
The answer is: I will not call her by telephone.
How can i know whether to put 'on' or 'by' in this sentence?
I will not call her on telephone simply sounds unnatural in English (the "the" is missing), while I will not call her by telephone sounds perfectly natural. It's a phrase that needs to be memorized, unfortunately. Prepositions are tough.
I wrote: "I won't call her by the telephone" and it says it's incorrect while suggesting me that "I won't call her on the telephone" is correct.
"By phone" or "By telephone" sounds better to my US ears. "By the telephone" sounds like you are describing someone's proximity to the telephone.
Thanks for the reply. :) Great to hear this from the native American. I don't have word for "the" in my mother language so I can't always tell correctly if I can put it there or not.
"The" can be real tricky when you are learning. Sometimes we have sentences where it's optional, For instance: "I play drums" and "I play the drums" are both valid and used interchangeably.
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Tbh, the only English phrasing that sounds natural to me is "I won't phone her". I will not call her by telephone is perfectly good grammar but no one would actually say it.
As someone else said, "vil" means "want", not "will". The thing that concerns me about this sentence is that "ringe" means to ring or call by phone, so if he doesn't want to call her on the phone, what does he want to use? I don't think "ringe" would mean "call" in the sense of loudly saying someone's name to attract their attention.
What are smartphones called? And is there a word for "phone" as opposed to "telephone"?
"Smarttelefoner", though it's not a word you see often outside of advertisements. Such a large part of the cell phone market is smart phones now anyway, so it's rarely specified.
"Telefon" cannot be shortened in Norwegian, but you can shorten "mobiltelefon" to "mobil".
"Med" is "with". But I assume they don't allow it because calling someone "with the telephone" is unnatural in English.
