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- "I have a mom and dad."
"I have a mom and dad."
Translation:У меня есть мама и папа.
41 Comments
I got caught on this as well and am happy to be corrected here. It seems that generally 'и' should be used when grouping similar things (in this case used because mum and dad are both parents) whereas 'а' is used when making a comparison.
Source: http://www.rus-on-line.ru/Exercises/Grammar/13-grammar.html
"У" translates to "At", "By", or "With". "Меня" is the genitive form of "Я", and just means "me". "У меня" therefore roughly translates to "At me", and when added with "Есть" (which means "There is/are". So "У меня есть" then just means "There is at me", and is the typical way to write "I have" in Russian.
Most Russians would definitely leave away the word есть when they say that they have a mother and a father. The word есть is mostly used in questions and answers like Да, есть. The robot voice is no useing intonation questions which are very typical to Russian, e.g. У тебя молоко? with a rising intonation on the last leter о is a question 'Do you have milk?' (I'm a Finnish Russian and English teatcher testing this app for my new pupils next autumn.)
565
In the task there is "a" in front of "mom" and "NOTHING(!)" in front of "dad". Why do they omit "a" in front of "dad"? see e.g. https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/i-have-a-mom-a-dad-and-a-sister.1957733/
You can check the correct and standardized tramsliteration here: https://www.translitteration.com/transliteration/en/russian/iso-9/
It doesn't help with the pronounciation though.
Here is the one I use : http://russian.typeit.org/ There are others , e.g. , babelpad , which is a fine program .
15
I use a virtual keyboard from https://www.branah.com/russian.Just type using your mouse and then copy and paste.Much easier than trying to remember Russian characters on an English keyboard!
309
why "у меня мама и папа" is wrong??? Do we really need "есть" here? (we didn't in other sentences)