"What does the wolf eat?"
Translation:Что ест волк?
32 Comments
Works now-just put it in. I'm a native English speaker and this order just seemed natural to me. :-D
You probably know this, but your last name means "sugar" in German! Yay for learning on Duolingo :D
«Что ест во́лка?»
So only the ending changes to change the meaning of the whole sentence???
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Yupp, that's how cases work. :-) It's similar to the distinctions she/her, he/him (and so on) in English, but not just for pronouns. And word order is less important than in English.
As an English speaker it's just so weird to me that Russian doesn't have any particular sentence structure. Once I start understanding cases better though, hopefully I'll get more used to it.
Yeah, Russian is so much easier in some ways because there aren't a lot of filler words
This word order sounds pretty unnatural, we usually place the interrogative pronoun at the beginning of the sentence. But if would be understandable, of course, just unnatural.
Cool, thanks. In English it likewise sounds unnatural, except if we want to stress the surprise of the question (e.g., we just heard a wolf ate the car's tailpipe) - "The wolf ate what?!" It's not really a question, so much as an exclamation of surprise.
Does Russian have an equivalent juggling of order like that?
You could say this in some situation where you deliberately wanted to stress it that way. It works. It is just not how people usually speak.
These questions got me wondering about how Yoda's speech is handled in Russian dubs of Star Wars. Answer: http://russian.stackexchange.com/questions/2924/how-is-yoda-speak-rendered-in-russian-are-there-easy-yet-universal-rules-i-ca
Clips of Russian Yoda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhoVbmJX_Uk
«Едят» is a plural verb form, while «волк» is singular. You can't use plural verb forms with singular nouns, you should change either the verb (что ест волк? 'what does a/the wolf eat?'), or the noun (что едя́т во́лки? 'what do wolves eat?')
Thank you! That was what I was suspecting. But long time away from Russian and mixing it with german made me think that «Едят» was a verb for when animals are eating. Like the german counter-part "essen-fressen".
Спасибо!
