"A girl is eating an apple."
Translation:Девочка ест яблоко.
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How can I tell from the English 'girl' if you mean девушка or девочка? According a source I have, the former means 'girl' and the latter means 'young girl.' Please discuss.
Thanks. That's what I thought. I used девушка and it marked it as wrong. I thought I was missing some cue.
They have not solve the problem even in 2019. "I used девушка and it got rejected"
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Both may be acceptable depending on context, but generally девочка is the direct translation for girl. Девушка is a woman starting from the teenage years and can refer to adult women who are not obviously old. I would say that 'young woman' or 'young lady' is the proper translation for девушка, not girl.
The most common example I can think of is anonymous interactions—if you want to speak to a random young woman on the street in English, you might use "ma'am" (especially in the US), in Russian you would use девушка.
When are nouns capitalised in the middle of a sentence? Are they ever?
Great question! Russians only capitalize proper nouns (Санкт-Петербург) or the initial word of a sentance: Вы были в Санкт-Петербурге? (See https://everydayrussianlanguage.com/en/russian-grammar/russian-grammar-rules/)
Another example: Это Оля, Боже мой! The words for "Olya" & "God" are both capitalized.
I was sure that "есть" was the correct answer. It tells me that I had a typo and says that "ест" was the right answer.
"ест" means "is eating" (e.g "Он ест" = "He is eating). "есть", with a soft sign ("ь") indicating palatalization, means "there is" or "there are" (e.g "В меиро есть человек" = "There are people in the subway"). There is also "У меня/тебя/вас/наго/неё/них есть", which is equivalent to "I/you/we/he/she/they have/has". Do you understand?
I think it would have been better to say "the little girl" and not only the girl. Girl also refers to a young person... The same problem as in German "Mädchen". Besides, there are here futher exercises in which the two nouns are accepted. The Russians are more accurate.
Try this. Just type the sentence in Russian, then copy and paste it in DuoLingo http://rosyjska.klawiatura.edu.pl/
If you use google, when you open your keyboard, in the bottom left (For me at least) there is what lokks like a sphere with two horizontal lines and two curved vertical ones, hold that and options may pop up
I think "A girl is eating apples": Девочка ест яблоки. You will often see "и", "a", "я" or "ы" ending for plural. It's a bit more complicated in Russian, there are exceptions even beyond these; I think when speaking of Rubles or hours they even have an ending for singular, one for a few (2-4) and a third for many (5 & above.) Perhaps that's why when I first asked about plural endings, the Native Speaker I was asking just laughed! ( :
Numbers force cases in russian. 2, 3, and 4 force genitive singular case for the next word. (Genitive is "of" in english). 5-20 force genitive plural. In the case of apple, you would say 1 apple (одно яблоко), 3 of apple (три яблока, 5 of apples (пять яблок)
Normal plural words almost always put ы at the end. But because ы isnt allowed after к (spelling rule), plural is яблоки
The audio pronounces ест as if it were yest. Is the y sound in the beginning always present with the letter е?
Yes. The letter е makes the "ye" sound, and the letter э makes the "e" sound.
едут means "they go by vehicle." The verb "to eat", есть, conjugates irregularly. I eat- ем. You eat- ешь. He/she eats- ест. We eat- едим. Y'all eat- едите. They eat- едят.
