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- "В какой город он едет?"
26 Comments
1650
That's actually better English grammar, technically speaking. You're not supposed to end sentences with prepositions, although that "rule" is largely ignored - as here.
650
Because most of us over 50 years old in the US would always have sentences ending with prepositions marked wrong on all their school papers, almost anyone in the country frequently hears constructions such as "to which city is he going". Younger people understand this, even if they may not use it, older folks simply find it hard to bring themselves to use the translation you seem to require.
775
That's a rule that doesn't apply to prepositions that are actually part of the verb, analogous to separable verbs in German and the other Germanic languages. Otherwise, we would write a lot of strange sentences up with which we do not put.
775
You could translate the Russian sentence into the present tense "To which city does he go?" instead of the present progressive "To which city is he going?"
1650
This Russian sentence makes me curious about spoken Russian. For instance, if you said this over a police radio, with a lot of hiss and static, you'd probably miss the initial B sound - but it's not really necessary, because context and the construction of the other parts of the sentence are clues to the existence of B at the beginning, even if it weren't heard.
As I've listened to various pronunciations of Russian words at forvo.com, some with wide variations in the pronunciation of the endings, it makes me think or even realize that the meaning of sentences as a whole doesn't come from precisely hearing everything in that sentence.