42 Comments
Why do we use ребёнок for child, singular and детн for children, plural? These words do not resemble one another. Ребята seems to be the plural for the other child form. Is there a difference between that and дети?
It is an irregular noun. Ребёнок - дети. Человек - люди. I guess they came from different stems.
Thank you for taking the time to explain it to me! I can't respond beyond the last comment, so I'll just do it here. This may seem like irrelevant information at this point considering my low level, but it helps me a lot to know just which parts are 'don't think about this, just use it like that' and which parts are 'you should understand this'.
I appreciate the input and information. :)
To my untrained eye, it would be more likely that the nouns ребёнок (s) - ребята (pl) are related, leaving me guessing as to the (s) form of детн (pl). I am uncertain how человек is related to my question? Unless that is somehow related to детн?
Completely different words are used in singular and plural. The word ребёнок has no plural form (ребята may be related but the meanings are different). Дети (note: not детн) is only plural and has no singular form but parallels the meaning of ребёнок.
Olimo mentioned человек and люди because they are a similar pair - parallel meanings, but человек is only singular and люди is only plural.
I can accept that as something native speakers would simply know, but being so far removed from one, I'd appreciate if you could explain what what, exactly, the difference in meaning is between ребята and ребёнок. If that's possible, anyway. Nuance is hard to pin down, I'll admit.
The second part of your comment makes complete sense, so I can accept that at face value. :)
Ребята can mean both "children" and "guys". Дети means children in age as well as children of someone - just like in English.
"Дети" actually has its singular form - "дитя".
But it has archaic / poetic usage.
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After all in English we do sometimes say "people" as a plural of "person" (singular)". Different stems. (Of course, "persons" is also perfectly correct as a plural of "person".)
Ребята = guys, Дети = children. At these level if you stick with these default translations you will be rarely mistaken.
Why is "do you have children ?" Wrong as an equivalent? If you dont know whether the person has children or not, you would naturally say it using the plural children... wouldnt you?
If you want to know if they have children, then you would naturally say it using the plural children. But if you want to know if they have a child, then you would use the singular child. That's what the question is here. Of course, in most cases it's more normal to use the plural rather than making any assumptions about the number of kids, but there could be exceptions and this is apparently one of them.
So do the Russian usually ask people if they have one child specifically? Or is it as uncommon to ask the sentence with ребёнок as with "a child"? (the point being to learn to speak naturally right?)
In Russian it's also possible and I think more common to say "У тебя есть дети?" Non-native speaker here, but I'm pretty certain you can use each sentence as you would the English equivalent, дети when you'd say children in English and ребёнок when you'd say child.
Why do I keep getting a "wrong" response if I type exactly the same thing that is in the correct solution box? I can't get on because it keeps asking the same thing and keeps grading me wrong?
That's quite possible Olimo. I'm still beginning to try and get used to the Russian letters. I thought it had to do with the apostrophe behind "est".
Ah, I don't know how to help you if you use transliteration. But if you use the Cyrillic script, you should use the Cyrillic letter Ё (or Е, it is also accepted).
Is "У тебя есть ребёнок?" correct and preferred? I was under the impression that omitting the "есть" is preferred, since the focus isn't so much on "possession" of the child per se.
If you like to memorize strong sillabes: Ё is always strong, so if Ребёнок, the sillabe бё is the strong. And О in a non-strong sillabe have the same sound of the à (brazilian portuguese letter sound)
Please contribute. You may notice something a native speaker missed. Grammar can be studied by anyone.
Experiencing a language helps. But nothing about language is absolute. So please put those questions out there.
Language evolves as we use it, too.
Homework: look up the definition of the English word "mark".
Im having trouble getting the hang of the phonetics for ребёнок, can someone help me out here? It sounds like "elebyonuk"
Yes, it should be pronounced. I hear it pretty clearly in the audio.
Remember that you can try forvo for pronunciations of words pronounced by actual live natives (as opposed to the robot here). https://forvo.com/languages/ru/
To remember what Child is in Russian, I just think that some children tend to be rebels. Ребëнок
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I believe "ребёнок" is "child", while "мальчик" is "boy", specifically a male child.
I just have realized how much easier is Russian in comparing of English, so many words in Englisch frazes. There´s a an The and so many unecessities we do not use. My birth language is kind of similar to Russian, yet very different, like the alphabet, but maybe it´s because I was learning Russian as a child.
"Do you have a child?" is grammaticaly correct. It's a standard way of building the Present Simple in English, the verb 'to have' is no exeception.
