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I call bulls on this one. She's definitely thinking about the neighbour
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Hrm :/ I keep making the mistake "my neighbour" instead of "the neighbour".
I know it must be "the" here but that just makes for a somewhat unnatural sentence no?
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There are more exercises like this, unfortunately. Continuously tricks me as well.
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"No, I'm not thinking about a neighbor" is also accepted :)
The English here makes me think of other uses of neighbor, for example, neighbors on the periodic table.
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So geeky... love it! Just like sodium and magnesium... lol
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о is used when the following word begins with a consonant and об is used before a word beginning with a vowel.
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Actually, I can name only 3 words (all them being pronouns) which need "обо": 1) Я (обо мне) 2) всё (обо всём) 3) все (обо всех)
Maybe I forgot some other examples, but it seems that "обо" is very specific preposition.
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А как же, например, "Мне надо подумать о встрече " или "... о многом", "Поговорим о ртутных соединениях"?
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To Dave Driesen: Yeah, I agree. In American English, we never say "the neighbor", it's always relative to someone else. "His neighbor", "my neighbor", "your neighbor" are all completely normal. When you say "the neighbor", you're implying that the neighbor in question could be halfway across the continent or even the world. If you don't have something relative to it, most people have no idea what you're talking about.
So... takeaway message? Reference points are good. And also DL's still in beta. There are bound to be possible answers and mistakes here and there.
:-D
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"No, I don't think about the neighbors." for essentially the same reason that Dave put "my neighbor," the sentence is unnatural in detect translation. The thing is Dave's "No, I don't think about my neighbor." is different in connotation than my "No, I don't think about the neighbors." and I am wondering where the range of "The guy next door can starve for all I care," and "I will not be swayed by the opinion of those around me," the Russian sentence falls?
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This is NOT natural English: no-one would say this! "the neighbors" - yes, but if it is ONE neighbor, we would say "our neighbor" or "that neighbor" or he/she would be named.