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- "У ребёнка нет мамы."
122 Comments
NOTE: Make sure when learning Russian from Duolingo, ALWAYS buy anti-depressant.
This has made me question my sanity. The reason I'm learning Russian is because I want to read their literature en nature.
Hey maybe it has no mum, but it has two dads! Always look at the bright side!
When pointing to someone without knowing the gender, We use '(S)he' or They(singular) .'It' is used to point to animals and objects.
Not sure if you're referring to the sentence structure or the continued failure to catch the case patterns...
The literal translation is At the child's place exists no mother. This is the russian way of expressing ownership. у меня есть хлеб, at my place exists bread. Hope that helps!
This is a great way to explain this, as it make it easier for to understand why the person (in this sentence, the child) is in genitive case as well.
No French y is a prepositional pronoun replacing a previously stated place. Tu vas au fac? Oui, j'y vais maintenant. Russian is just a preposition. Russian to have is like Arabic. Where the possessed thing is nominative and the possessor is genitive. "At me is a mother."
Habiib If I may, you should say Tu vas à la fac. Congratulations you speak 7 languages !
عندي? :) Thanks for the comment habiib :) In Hebrew we say "yesh li" יש לי, which literally means "there is to me". Peace :)
my comment was really messed up and I have no idea how to fix this! :( Oh well
Guys I forgot that Duolingo can be either really perverted or depressing. I also did a sentence that was "the soldier does not have a family". Dang, Duolingo, way to get dark!
Why is it ребёнка and not ребёнока? I've seen a few mentions of vowels being dropped but is there a way of knowing when it happens?
Also, am I correct in thinking for negatives the format should be Y <noun in gen> нет <noun in gen>?
Russian is almost entirely rhythm. Over time you'll see the changes are very constant with the flow of the language and you'll be able to suddenly change it correctly to your own amazement
Yes, negatives work like that. And in the nominative form, Russians don't like it when consonants are clusters. Which is why they insert the о. But in other cases, it is dropped. There will be a future lesson which covers a lot of those dropping vowels.
Why is it ребёнка and not ребёнок? Many of the the sentences form with у + есть seem to have plural endings also.
It's a specific structure. In English you use [possessor] have/has, and in Russian it's У [possessor in Genitive] есть [noun in Nom.] or нет [noun in Gen.]. So, in this sentence the child is a possessor and he does not have a mother, so мама is in Genitive. Btw, мамЫ here is Gen.sing., not Nom.pl.
Damn! I should've just gone with the genitive as provided by http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/morphque.cgi?flags=endnnnnp for мамы. It sounded so much like мама, though, that I thought, naw, I got this. D'oh.
If word order doesn't matter, and both "child" and "mother" are in the genitive case, then how is one to know which of these nouns is the object and which is the subject?
It's not that word order doesn't matter. That's too strong of a description. Word order in Russian is certainly more free than in English, but not completely without order. So, у + genitive in this case does indicate the possessor of something.
A relatively new word order topic by szeraja_zhaba can be found here: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/13955228. It's a first draft, but it might help regardless. :)
It's quite annoying that some questions will allow you to use «ы» as «и» and just call it a "typo", but this question will not allow «е» for «ё»... particularly egregious when the first is getting a wrong ending, but the second is just a common thing in day to day use.
("Ребенок не с их матерью." I think? See Theron126 below)
Or "Ребенок не со своей матерью."
see this:
Отец обязан обеспечивать удовлетворение финансовых потребностей своих детей, даже если они уже не живут со своей матерью.
The first sentence is different, it means "with their (plural, some other people's) mother. You can't use "их" for singular "their" in Russian, it would have to be "его", but that would again likely be understood as meaning someone else's mother. When the object belongs to the person who is the subject of the sentence, it is correct to use "свой", so you're right the second time.
Oh, I never considered that "their" could be singular. I stumbled across the second one accidentally. So the second one turns out to mean "his own" in this case and would be correct for the above lesson sentence, although it could also mean "their own"? and the first sentence actually does mean "their" which is plural and could be interpreted from Strabonis' sentence? In English, there is a third possibility "their" could include several children who are siblings and it could then be that the child is one of those siblings and it is his mother as well as theirs. For example, "Where are the rest of them? They are with their mother, but he is not with their mother." Although I would still be more likely to say "his" in that second part even if they share a mother.
LOL, I never thought about your interpretation, even when writing out that that's what your first sentence means! Yes, if you interpret it as "with their (plural) mother", as opposed to with his own, your first sentence is correct.
You also can never use "его/ее/их" if you're referring to the person's thing to begin with, as then it implies that it's someone else's thing. You use the adjective свой to denote if it's the person's own thing. For instance, Муж ужинает со его женой would mean that he's having dinner with someone else's wife, but Муж ужинает со своей женой comfortably means that he's with his own wife eating dinner. As you can see, the connotations can be vastly different. Свой can be used in place of Мой, Твой, Наши, Ваши, also, but I'd say it's optional in those contexts since no one's going to be confused if I'm talking about my thing or my own thing.
ALSO... In common relationships you can usually just drop off the possessive adjective altogether since it's implied that if you're talking about a ребенок с мамой, it means that the child is with his or her own mother, not someone else's.
Suggestion: the mom let her child eat her because they were both starving, so it's okay. Please do not ask me what is going on in my mind or why; some spiders do something like that, actually...
What I know is in the genitive case , we have to add an " a " after masculine words ending with a consonant . so why the answer is ребенка not ребенока ??
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Because it is irregular. Some words break the rules, and you just have to memorize them. And the plural of ребёнок is дети. How's that for irregular? :-)
It is called a fleeting "o", and there are also fleeting "e's" (for instance, слово Немец becomes Немца in genitive, and many such -ец words do, too).
given the case could you also say "мамы нет у рабёнка"? or rearrange the sentence in other ways and still get the same meaning?
Has anyone noticed that the first word has some really weird suggestions that don't really fit the sentence structure?
I think it's just because it's a preposition with such varied meanings and I don't think they can go through each sentence individually and specify its meaning in each exact sentence. Based on my DL experience, it just uses whatever definition(s) is/are given for the word and displays that in each sentence.
Does this literally mean that the child is like a clone made in a lab or something, or does it mean "The child no longer has a mother"? Or both?
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Both. Though we know nothing about dad, here ;) У ребёнка нет родителей - The child does not have parents
Can somebody tell me why in the romanizated version I have to type 'rebenka' instead of 'rebyonka'? It happens the same with 'vse' and 'vsyo' (всё)
There are many transliteration systems, but it would be kind of difficult to adopt every single possible one, so it's easier to just stick to this basic one where ё is "e" which is "e" in English.
Thanks for your answer, but I think 'yo' would fit better. Besides beind a basic transliteration, is 'e' used to avoid some kind of conflict between letters or what?
Ye/E is used presumably because in printed Russian ё is printed as an e anyway, and to possibly avoid confusion with ио or ыо.
Well at any rate I'm not trying to debate which system is better than another one or more logical than another one, just trying to point out that I assume the more options a computer can accept, the less accurate it becomes in "checking" answers.
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This was a listening exercise for me; the pronunciation of the second word, even when listened to slowly, sounds like it begins with "д". It completely misled me.
@dj3S4 - Please report it using the appropriate tool if you feel your version is correct. Unfortunately we can't do anything through the Discussions page to explain why or why it shouldn't be accepted if you don't post your answer, though.
ребёнок (Nom. Sing.) ends in a consonant, so it´s masc. "Y" in the sense of possession makes it Genitive: Masc. Gen. Sing. adds "a".
- Thus sorta regular in the sense that it ends with "a" but does a weird habberdash in the middle: Gen. Sing. ребёнка (rather than ребёнoка, which would be the result of a strict application of the rule).
- But, on a side note, definitely irregular in the Nom. Plu. ребя́та (rather than ребёнoкы ) and in the Acc. Plu. of the animate object ребя́т (rather than ребёнoкoв).
(https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B1%D1%91%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%BA#Russian)
мамa is probably the Nom. Sing. form, as mother is most likely fem.
Fem. Gen. Sing. replaces "а" with "ы".
Helpful tables for Russian declensions:
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Thanks for the forgjveness and all (i wrote mama) but i got confused why it wasnt мамы.
Hopefully not the same person who has no father from the translation before...
This one comes up so often I feel like someone at duo had a bad time
apology for poor english
when were you when мамы dies?
i was sat at home eating smegma butter when pjotr ring
‘мамы is kill’
‘нет’
honestly i think duoling needs to make sentences more practical for day to day life
Perhaps, but some sentences are intentionally weird so you'd remember them better!
Ребенок is in genitive because of the preposition У (it always takes genitive); мама is in genitive because it is negated by the word нет. So, both words have to be in genitive for it to be grammatically correct.
Yes, мамы is the plural for "moms"... in the nominative case. However, genitive case is used here due to the negation of the noun by the word нет. If you wanted to say "the child doesn't have any moms", you'd say у ребенка нет мам (where it has no ending at all).
