70 Comments
Hey, I know the answer to this one! "This is a woman" isn't correct because женщины is plural. Women vs woman. Singular woman is женщина I think.
Yep, you're right. I deleted my original question before you replied because I worked it out but thank you anyway!
Why in the full sentence "Это женщины" does the word женщины sound like it's pronounced with an и sound added in almost like "женищины" but when played on its own it's pronounced phonetically?
ы is a vowel that doesn't exist in English. ы in English would kind of sound like "Ayee" as one continuous vowel. When speaking Russian at a nominal speed, ы and и are difficult to distinguish, and will rely on your personal knowledge of regular and gender based conjugation to differentiate them in your head.
You mean when the audio says "zhe-NI-shi-ny"? Yeah, I think it's a technical error
From what I read I think this is an issue regarding palatalization and non-palatalization (I assume "нщи" is a soft, palatalized cluster, and that modifies its pronunciation). But since I didn't understand the lesson on this very well I'm afraid I can't help you any further...
The н in «нч» and «нщ» is indeed always palatalized. The pronunciation in this particular sentence, though, is a bit glitchy. The voice wobbles in "женщ", and it should not.
Why do we use это in this case? Isn't это masculine as well as singular? The sentence is talking about women (plural and feminine). So why not эта or эти?
"Это..." is a structure meaning "This is/These are...", while "эта" is a feminine demonstrative pronoun for "this". So "Это женщины" - "These are women" and "Эти женщины" - "These women".
thankyou. This is the first good explanation i've had about this in over a year. Many people try to say that щ is s+ch like "fresh cheese". Compared with your excellent explanation, this is just plain wrong.
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As a general rule plurals(when there is more than one) in English don't get articles like a/an/the. One exception as far as I am aware is if it is part of a name - The Pixies, The Rolling Stones, The Avengers. Another exception is when you are pointing out a specific group e.g. Yes officer, these are the women who did it, but now you have classified them as a singular group(as one) as opposed to a group of women(as many individuals).
Whenever I click on женщины it says "Woman's (принадлежность)"? Is принадлежность another word for women?
You probably don't care a year later, but still, in case anyone else is wondering about it: no, it means "possession", and it's here to explain to the reader that "woman's" is the possessive form in this case as opposed to being the contraction of "woman is".
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User "raspberry-shake" answered that very clearly above. You may find it using the search function (ctrl+f).
I got marked wrong for "They are women". Is there actually a difference in translation, or was it just missed?
I did the Right answer (which i think is wrong, it should be this is a woman) and it still doesn't week
In the audio recording, it sounds like there's an extra vowel between the first two syllables of женщины
I understand that женщины is women, but why does это mean "these are" rather than it is? I said it is, and it was still counted correct, but it just sounds odd that это can mean both "this is" and "these are". o.0
Apparently this just answered my question (different one from the above). Thanks!
Can't это женщина be translated to as "these women"? If not, then how do i translate it to as such?
I really can't hear the difference between женщина and женщины. Both sound kinda like 'женщ-uh-н-eh' (sorry for the weird phonetic writing), at least when said fluently in a sentence. It has to do with the unstressed vowels becoming reduced somehow, I guess...
I have a great deal of difficulty reading transliterated Russian words. zhenshiny is very confusing because when my mind is in Russian mode, the character "y" is the Russian letter "y" and not the English transliteration for "ы". Grrr! Is there any way that I can configure the program so that only Cyrillic letters are in the text when Russian words are represented???
When you're doing lessons, in the top left corner there should be a little slider "Aa-Яя". Clicking that will put your lessons into Cyrillic. If you're using an app you may need to use the browser version to change the setting.
Why can't this be "это женщина" (this is a woman)? The last sound in женщины sounds a bit like a soft A so that's why I constantly write "женщина" instead of "женщины"
it says "these are woman" when it should be these are wemen, or change the RTussian word for wemen to woman, and write this is a woman.
No, it says "women", which is the correct plural form of "woman" in English. "Wemen" is just plain wrong.
The Russian word for women sounds quite similar to the Punjabi word for it, which is "Jannāni" (HLA spelling).
Punjabi is also descended from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), as are English, Russian and most other European and Indic languages, with notable exceptions. As such, you should expect a large number of words that are etymologically related and some that are almost the same.
Punjabi prepositional case is like 70% similar to Russian's and many Indian names are popular Russian names too. For example, Anushka, Taniya, Natasha, Sima and many more.
Listen closely to the audio sounds like she is saying it with a sour face. :]
