"Do you know German or English?"
Translation:Ты знаешь немецкий или английский?
21 Comments
How do you know if it's "Ты" or "Вы"? How is it possible to distinguish when it's only "Do you"?
It's hard to know whether it's "ты" or "вы" when there isn't much context, so both are acceptable translations for "you " in our course.
Both answers should be acceptable, of course don't forget to conjugate the verb appropriately (вы знаете in this case).
They're both fine (ты is singular/informal and вы is plural/formal), so I would say if the choice is yours pick whichever you want in the moment or switch it up if you don't care. If you're choosing words already selected in duolingo where you build the sentence from the words, pick whichever is there.
Is this question asking if you know either language (simultaneously asking if you speak one/both/neither), or if you specifically speak one or the other (ie you definitely speak one of them but the person asking isn't sure which)?
I've only seen it with по-английски, which is probably because it is an adverb there instead of an adjective.
Because немецкий comes from немец; немей which means "mute" and it was used to refer to any language (and people) that they couldn't understand. It's a slavic word; which means it doesn't come from the Latin word "Germania; Germanus; Germani" (unlike the English equivalent, German).
That's kind of funny, actually. Would <<германский>> be understood to mean "German language", though?
Isn't the right answer немецкий и английский языкИ? Does anyone know what's exactly the rule here? As I know, you need to use plural form ...
Thanks. And what about my case? Is it singural or plural when you use "и"?
With "И", it should be plural, but it won't sound too wrong if you use the singular form. In fact, I'd drop "языки" altogether and make it just "Я знаю английский и немецкий", for example.
Is there any reason, beyond it simply being idiomatic, why you would use 《ты знаешь немецкий...?》 and not 《 ты умеешь немецкий. .》? In my head I think of speaking a language as a skill, rather than a fact you can know, so... just curious! :)
"Ты умеешь немецкий" sounds like "You can German" or "You know how to German". It does not make sense.
You can say "Ты умеешь говорить по-немецки" - You can speak German or You know how to speak German.
Wenn man Deutsch kann, macht es doch Sinn, имееть немецкий zu sagen. ;)
Если бы нужно выбрать язик, о чём без второго глагола сказать "Я умею", выбрай-ка немецкий, потому что это по-немецки верный набор, даже нормалная форма выражения.
Please excuse the pedantry for the sake of some Russian practice. :) Any hints and corrections would be appreciated, of course. I'm hoping that meant:
If you have to choose a language about which to say "I can" without a second verb, might as well choose German, because in German, that's a grammatically correct sentence, even the normal way to express that thought.
