85 Comments
As an Australian this sentence is absolutely hilarious, and makes me hungry... Why must I be so far from tim tams?
Spread some vegemite over it and it's ready to eat with some Borscht :P lol.
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
Even though im an American, i would love to have some too! We dont have many stores that sell them in the US. :c
this is a very bad introduction especially for people who are not used to languages of this construction
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They ask you to translate what you hear. How can you roll your topo over an audio button?
That's weird, I've never had an exercise to translate audio, just to write down what was said.
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!!
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?
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".
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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.
Is there a certain inflection with Russian questions, like with english?
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 ?
on duolingo you can finish very fast... to be fluent it takes practice which could last very long
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…
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.
What's the pronunciation between "o" and "a"? In the audio clip they were hard to distinguish.
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...)
Is there any way to distinguish between saying "Is Tim there?" and "Tim is there." besides inflexion?
I am struggling with there is, where is, here is etc - ты, где там and в. Can anyone help me out?
Additional emphasis would be placed on Tim then ("Tom, is Tim the one who's there?")
I am a Russian and English native speaker. When i said, " Tom, Tim Tam." The computer did not here me.
Почему озвучка курса автоматическая? Если нужно, я могу озвучить фразы, я думаю.
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?
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"?
I wrote exactly the correct answer and it counted it as wrong, while still suggesting the thing i wrote
I feel like it's hard to tell when the audio is a question or an affirmative sentence. Or is there a difference in grammatical structure when you say "Tom, Tim is there" versus "Tom, is Tim there?"?
I thought he was saying Дом, not Том. Replayed it a few times to make sure. Thought maybe he was saying "Home, Tom is there" which I thought might mean "Tom is at home". Feel a bit silly now hahaha.
