"Анна бы лучше училась, если бы не опаздывала каждый день."
Translation:Anna would study better if she were not late every day.
7 Comments
366
Can I just give a quick shout out to the native Russian speakers who created these lessons? The "slow speed" of the pronunciations is the best I've heard in any lesson, for any language, on Duolingo -- ever.
Your enunciation is almost flawless, and it's a great help.
The native Russian speakers have made it clear on the forum discussions for other exercises that "лучше учиться" refers to the results of study, so "study better" is a misleading translation. Better translations would be: "Anna would get better grades / marks / results ... " or "Anna would do better / do better in school ... " So I've flagged the exercise.
Your учиться means "learn" while this lesson uses училась for "study".
She WERE? not WAS ? It's a new option for me, but I've heard it the first time.
Generally it's not correct for singular except in subjunctive cases as part of the conditional statement, which use it for even singular nouns (and sometimes some rearranging of the sentence).
Consider the following- 'I was not there, so you were in trouble', which is exactly as it seems, everything's past tense. But if you said, 'Were (!!!) I not there, you would be in trouble', which creates a hypothetical or 'subjunctive', a scenario of what is going to happen IF certain conditions are/n't met. Generally the phrasing is one of the following- 'Were , would...' 'Were I studying, I would not have been able to go.'
'Were , would...' 'Were I to clean my room, I would have no time to relax.'
'If was/were , would...' (with would sometimes contracting to "'d"). 'If Dillon was smart, he would stop poking that bird.' 'If she were awake, she would do it herself.' 'If I were to guess, I'd say they are.' 'If they were annoying, they would not be here.' ('was' doesn't work with a plural subject)
And this works backwards as well. 'I'd like dogs, if I wasn't allergic.' 'She'd do better, were she to study.' 'He would run fast, if he was athletic.'
