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- "Мухи не любят хлеб."
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Because they want to take the revenge of their recently smashed sister, probably? I don't know...
ONE FLY? 10,000 "FLIES" were on my брат dead body when I found him after a week of rot.
I swear to God, I was eating a sandwitch and a fly landed on it RIGHT before I read this. Oh the irony.
While the word for like used here can translate to love it is generally reserved for refering to people, like is used for objects. Although this could be a correct translation metaphorically? But as a statement I think that translation is wrong.
Then why did the other sentence proclaim that "Flies like bread very much"?
An unstressed я is pronounced more like и. Same with unstressed е and э
Essentially just memorization. When duolingo introduces a new word, and in most russian dictionaries, there's a stress mark on the stressed vowel. This mark isn't written in practice though.
Further reading: http://masterrussian.com/blog/stressed-about-word-stress-in-russian-language/
Люблю is like or love, right? Sometime Duo refuse one or the other translation. "Do you love me?" and "Flies don't like bread." are two of them. English uses love for almost all that is not a formal appreciation. It means from "to like so much" to real love. Is it similar in Russian? How do you say "I love you"?
The lesson notes explain that любить means "like" unless you are refering specifically to a person in such a context. Нравиться means sort of a less passionate "liking" of something.
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I hear the speaker pronounce the х in мухи like "ch" in the German "nicht". Am I hearing it right?
Я люблю русский, but flies land on bread all the time. There are many silly sentences and phrases I see in duolingo in general...I suppose the point is to learn context?
люби́ть (ljubítʹ) [lʲʉˈbʲitʲ] impf (perfective полюби́ть) "to love, to like" From Proto-Slavic *ľubiti, from Proto-Indo-European *lewbʰ- whence English love, Lithuanian liaupsė (“praise”), Latin libet ("it is pleasing"), Albanian lyp ("I beg").
Source: Wiktionary.
I'm hearing " Muhe" instead of "Mukhe" .... Is it pronounced like that or I'm just sleepy ?
Why is this teaching people that любить means 'to like'. It doesn't. They should be using нравится or нравятся...
Shouldn't it be хлеба, because of the не? Or does that only apply when talking about posession?
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Simply put, не negates the verb (любят) and not the object of the verb (хлеб) which remains in inanimate accusative case.
Negation is a difficult subject, from what I've read about it. It's different with нет where you'd have to use genitive нет хлеба.
"Bread" is not a countable noun in English. Therefore we would never say "a bread", "two breads" etc. If you want to get specific about numbers in relation to bread, you have to use countable nouns like "loaf" or "slice" - e.g. "a/one slice of bread, two slices of bread etc." or "a/one loaf of bread, two loaves of bread etc.". But no native English speaker would ever say "Flies do not like a bread". With uncountable nouns, you don't use indefinite articles or numbers. So it's "Flies do not like bread", never "Flies do not like a bread".
I don't know whether Russian has uncountable nouns with its lack of indefinite articles, but I suppose it must do. If you wouldn't use a number with it in Russian, the English equivalent is probably (though maybe not definitely) uncountable as well.
oh sorry, I knew all that things about articles, I do not understand why it happend to me :) Russians can say one bread, and two breads and they know, it means one slice of bread, it is grammatically correct I suppose (in Slovak language it is)
There is another problem with this course. At the beginning when I started the Russian course I suppose to learn conjugation I and conjugation II for singular and plural case. That's how I have learned Italian, Norwegian and English. I have learned the singular and plural conjugation by heart, then I know which one to use.
Bad grammatical agreement. "Doesn't" (contraction of "does not") goes with the third person SINGULAR, not plural. So "A fly doesn't like bread" would be fine, but "Flies doesn't like bread" is grammatically incorrect. You have to say "Flies DON'T (contraction of "do not") like bread".
