"Моя лошадь не художник, а архитектор."
Translation:My horse is not an artist but an architect.
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They've actually said publically that the weird sentences help learning, according to their experts.
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Why should it be nonsense? Doubtlessly, there are many fine horses who work as artists and architects in Russia.
Actually the term career came from racing horses. As their working lifespan was considered a career.
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And ducks who fight with turtles in the Spanish speaking countries :-) Relax, this nonsense is here to make you smile!
It's not a nonsense! In spain, we have what we call Beat the Turtle tournaments and only ducks are allowed!
No just kidding. Of course those weird surrealistic sentences are there on purpose. It's, like I call it in Belgium, un "moyen mnemotechnique" to remember the words, a sort of "way to remember words" (here, by having a strange sentence that you will definitely not forget so fast).
When you consider the U.S president is a donkey (ass) then I guess horses can be anything they want to be.
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I can tell you're one of those people that has to bring politics into every conversation.
Well it made me laugh. I have been practicing my listening by translating with eyes closed and not using the given words (it gives you a clue when you see them) and I played this three or four times before I finally accepted there was nothing else the woman could possibly have been saying. Horse architecture at its very best. And it's given me a pun. Whose house did the female horse design? Your neighbour's ... Whohahaha. Hopefully I won't be banned from Duolingo for such a terrible joke... :-)
Banned? Of course not. Here's a lingot for your corny joke! That was worth a chuckle.
Not strange at all. My horse is an astronaut or should I say cosmonaut.
Meanwhile my horse just sits at home doing nothing other than my Duolingo exercises :D
I suppose it is easier for our equine prodigy to hold a pencil than it is to hold a paint brush.
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Well... I don't know, but it seems to me this sentence is a nonsense. It is a very strange sentence
Are you suggesting that horses who are architects aren't also artists, Duo..?
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Glad that we're learning practical phrases like this, just in case we want to join a Russian improv troop.
This is in the great tradition of Russian literature -- Gogol, Bulgakov. Thanks!
I would not be surprised at all to learn that this sentence was an excerpt straight out of a Даниил Хармс story.
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Ok besides the memes and all this is stupid !!! Why not teaching us some good useful sentences that we can use in life and has the grammar and vocabulary and wtvr rules in it instead of nonsense phrases like this ... this is seriously stupid
Unless you're just learning to parrot back exact, full sentences without understanding how to construct them, you don't need the sentences to be "useful". The vocabulary is useful, the grammatical constructions are useful, you're supposed to be learning how to formulate your own sentences, not just recite whatever Duolinguo said verbatim.
In Russian, horses are architects, in Dutch, ducks read and apples speak :D
Can this construction be used to say that a person is bad at one aspect of their job, but otherwise competent at it? Or do I have to use но?
Ex:
My dad is no artist, but he's a {competent} builder.
Мой отец не художник, а/но {competent} строитель.
My sister is no composer, but she writes good librettos.
Моя сестра а не компоситор, а/но она пишet хорошиe {librettos}.
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Erm....it's good to know we are learning useful phrases for everyday conversation. There's a really good one in the Latin programme as well: "Dirty weasels live in the bedroom." So useful! (rofl)
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HAHAH well, I used to have a couple of dirty weasels myself, but I called them ferrets ;-)
In my country when someone is very bad in something, we call him a horse. Of course it's a offensive way, it's a close friend stuff. Definitely a pun or a algorism fail.
At first I thought this sentence was an idiom, but then I considered that maybe it's only Russian horses that can build and paint. лол.
jokes aside, what is the indication that лошадь is feminine? I would have said мой instead of моя.
The word indicates. In Russian, animals always have a gender. Лошадь is femimine. Конь is masculine. Thus мой конь but моя лошадь.
The other examples:
кот (m) - кошка (f) a cat
бык (m) - корова (f) a cow
Sometimes the word may mean a species of animal (like in english), but anyway the word has a gender .
For example: собака (f), свинья (f).
Thank you! So I’m assuming words that aren’t noticeably feminine (not ending with а or я) just need to be memorized? My native language is Polish in which this is the case, feminine nouns usually end in -a and the ones that don’t are just remembered.
I think you just need to memorize it for all words that end in ь. If you speak another slavic language with a cognate word, the gender is likely (but not certainly) the same.
Are you SURE a human proofreads these questions, Duolingo? Because they seem very randomly-generated.
Odd sentences are no less valid for learning. If you can understand the words in a sentence where you can't just predict the meaning, you have a much better grasp of them. Besides, humor while learning is always a good thing.
Зато - used to express a substitutional opposition relationship
- They didn't have much... but we had each other.
Но - used to introduce something contrasting with what has already been mentioned.
- They are smart, but poor.
а - used to connect clauses, words or sentences.
They drink water in the morning, and (they drink) milk in the evenings.
I hope that's clear
Но vs а.
The А is used to give a more accurate description of an object rather than to contrast them.
This sentence could be a great addition to the well-known sequence that starts with "I will not buy this record, it is scratched".
I translated it easily--a simple sentence, then I thought I must be an idiot. But a horse is a horse, of course. So, why the weirdness in a language program? I think Kafka when I read it and another word that rhymes with it. Humor=superb. Usefulness in a language teaching program= jury is out.
This sentence is definitely queer (the original meaning of that word)
Err, the non-original meaning of the word is now off limits as regards to what the second meaning referred to, so the original meaning is now the only meaning, I think :-).
Why 'maja', not 'moi'? The horse 'loshad' refers to masculine noun, doesn't it?
лошадь is feminine. Most Russian nouns that end in дь or ть are feminine.
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It is cheaper to let the horse do the design for the house, all a real architect. Because of that!
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There is no such word "drug" in Russian.
Did you mean «друг» ("friend") or «драг» (genitive plural of «дра́га», in slang also means "drug" (from English), yes)?
I came here to mention my answer was 100%correct, written exactly as the example of the correct answer and it was marked wrong, but the comments were more interesting :p
This sentence is so famous that I already knew of it from the discussion under another question haha
In Russian, the name of an animal should be masculine or feminine. The masculine word for horse is конь, the лошадь is feminine. You used feminine for horse but the masculine pronoun мой. It was the reason why that Russian guy corrected you.
Мой конь генальный sounds good lol.
Caligula's horse was elected consul by the senators...freely and intelligently !
I guess this means, his turds may not be beautiful, but you can use them to build one heck of a brick wall, huh? ;)
Какая умная лошадь, на каком университете учиться ей? ( what an intelligent horse, in which university did she study?)