"Том, Тим там?"
Translation:Tom, is Tim there?
91 Comments
As an Australian this sentence is absolutely hilarious, and makes me hungry... Why must I be so far from tim tams?
Sadly vegemite would be terrible on a chocolate biscuit... They tried making some vegemite chocolate this year and it did not go down well... Chocolate and beetroot does work though! :p
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this is a very bad introduction especially for people who are not used to languages of this construction
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i find it's a good intro into russian syntax and grammar. One has to start somewhere and i think this is totally valid for intro, so long as they have the explanation, like they usually do, underneath where exercises are chosen.
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Mind you, this is still in beta. It'll be a while before all the organizational kinks are ironed out.
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It's also helpful for pronunciation. I've had trouble distinguishing том and там, so I appreciate hearing them so close together.
Starting from the first question, asking someone to translate a sentence (any words really, but a full sentence certainly) without showing them what any of the words mean first is not helpful. Things should be at least introduced before you assume people will have any capacity to answer questions related to them.
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Even hovering over the words doesn't really help you understand the grammatical structure. Tom was also suggested to be "that". And since there were missing pieces of grammar that would be common in English it was a bit difficult to comprehend.
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That's why you give it a try and if you're wrong, you'll know the next time. Language is more than just a set of rules. It's sometimes more helpful to learn phrases and sentences than to memorize grammar. That way you can get AWAY from the temptation to apply your own language's patterns to another language that does not function that way. And it's exactly this step AWAY from pure grammar that has made DuoLingo so popular.
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You still have to learn the missing pieces of grammar to realize that, but by using something that is not that easily discernible makes it harder to learn the right way to understand a phrase. I'm not advocating for pure grammar as you've stated, but rather a reasonable scaffolding of knowledge.
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They ask you to translate what you hear. How can you roll your topo over an audio button?
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That's weird, I've never had an exercise to translate audio, just to write down what was said.
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I believe adding a Russian keyboard at this level would be crucial. I have typed what I have heard, in English letter, as "Tom, Tim Tam" and would've loved to try guessing how to write them (and other basic words/sentences) in Cyrillic script. I think that way one would get familiarized faster and better to the alphabet.
Other than that, I am intrigued by the sentence structure. I think it would be better for me to compare it to Arabic where one can similarly say, if translated literally, "Tim Doctor" and "Tim there?" without having a specific word for "To be".
In the normal audio clip it doesn t sound at all like a question! I wrote "Tom, Tim is there." and it took it as a wrong answer!!
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I was thinking about that as well. In english, there is a certain inflection to questions, and i was wondering if that element is there for Russian as well. Perhaps the program is not "smart" enough to incorporate it?
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its not very hard... slavic languages and turkish languages dont have words for to be in the present so everything is: me boy, you girl, me skater, etc... sounds kinda primitive but that is the way it is
in your opinion in scale from 1 to 10 how hard is Russian language and how many months do i need to finish it ?
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on duolingo you can finish very fast... to be fluent it takes practice which could last very long
Is there any way to distinguish between saying "Is Tim there?" and "Tim is there." besides inflexion?
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I don't get all the complaints in this comment section. I think that sentence was nice to memorize the word там and its concept…
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In Russian, the verb "to be" is ommited when the sentence is in the present. As there were no other verbs to be found, it can be deduced that the verb of this sentence is the verb to be. So... "Tom, Tim there?" becomes "Tom, IS Tim there?", as this is the only place to fit the verb.
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and how are people who only understand western european languages suppose to know that right out of the gate
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This information is in the "Tips & Notes" section (I do not remember for which lesson). It is vital to read them to learn a language that works different (and Russian is a very good example!). It is a shame that the "Tips & Notes" are still unavailable for the mobile version, though.
Anyway, no one is supposed to get it right at first, and you should not feel frustrated because of this alien sentence coming too soon with no warning. Yeah, you got it wrong at first, but now you talked about it and learned how it works. The whole point is that Duolingo is not a test -- it is a course. Mistakes play a really important role here. My experience is that the things I remember the most are the ones that took me more time to get right.
I am struggling with there is, where is, here is etc - ты, где там and в. Can anyone help me out?
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The lady speaking in Russian doesn't seem to sound like she's asking a question. It sounds like a statement.
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Is there a certain inflection with Russian questions, like with english?
What's the pronunciation between "o" and "a"? In the audio clip they were hard to distinguish.
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http://i.imgur.com/4XoD7Ic.png
I found this on the incubator page. Hope it helps. (This was the first question I got, and I'm extremely &^%$%^&, and I'm procrastinating...so...)
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Почему озвучка курса автоматическая? Если нужно, я могу озвучить фразы, я думаю.
Why it doesn't use the cyrillic/russian alphabet? Why does it display english letters? for example the letter 'i' in Tim.
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The switch says that it's when you know the cyrillic alphabet, but I don't know it, I want to learn it. Where is the option for learning it?
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On Mac you go into systems and add cyrillic (phonetic Russian is the best because the keys are positioned in a similar way to what we are used to). Then you can also select "virtual keyboard" and a little box shows which letter is which key, so you can type without looking at your fingers.
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this is it ... simple little words and phrases to get accustomed... at any rate you can just look up cyrillic alphabet on google and see all the equivalent latin letters and diphtongs
Next to the switch (That I haven't found on android, but on chrome I did and now, on the android device it works too), There is Tips & Notes button.
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If you want to practice touch-typing: http://www.keybr.com
Practice -> Settings -> Keyboard Layout
Change the language to Russian. :)
It'll start with just a few letters and add them as you gain proficiency (and you can force it to add more, or take some away, as desired).
Yeah I was seriously confused as well. Just heard that Russian was added to duolingo, so I signed up. This is a pretty discouraging place to land at. "Here are three words that look and sound the same, now what do they mean?" I typed the words as they showed in the tooltips, but that was apparently incorrect. I didn't have any idea that they were asking me to create a grammatically correct sentence in English using three words in Russian that I don't know, as well as zero previous knowledge of Russian grammar.
why isn't "tom, where is tim?" the same as "tom, is tim there?" just wondering
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там means "there." It's the only word in this sentence that isn't a name.
Good teaching method, but the program itself is a little wonky.. Most of the times it delays.
I wrote it Exactly as it is written and it still marked me as wrong, can any one tell me why?
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I think this program ignores punctuation. "Tom tim is there" vs "Tom is tim there" are very different when you dont factor punctuation
Without seeing punctuation, how would I know this doesn't mean "Tom, Tim is there"?
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intonation 
but it indeed sounds like it is a statement and not a question
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I am a Russian and English native speaker. When i said, " Tom, Tim Tam." The computer did not here me.
Very poor explanations, because we need a kind of introduction to explain some kind of things like how to use the sentence and why. This exercises are just the literal translation, not very helpful to truly beginnings, because the structure of the Russian language is different and not follow the same logic of english language
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I have an android, and there are different keyboard you can install, and then switch between them. Samsung keyboard has cyrillic. пожалуйста!
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I think it'd help help if you started with the alphabet and sounds, it'd help a lot in spelling.
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I wrote exactly the correct answer and it counted it as wrong, while still suggesting the thing i wrote
