"У тебя есть чай?"
Translation:Do you have tea?
22 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
Unfortunately the course uses a TTS program and not a real speaker so there are occasionally mispronunciations. I would recommend forvo.com if you want to hear more examples of pronunciation by native speakers.
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That's a relief! I thought I was the only one hearing чай as "che". Unfortunate, though, that the audio is still the same after three months.
Do you have the tea is marked wrong. The use of articles in English often refers to specificity. If I was in a restaurant and said, "Do you have tea," I am asking if they serve tea in general. If I say, "Do you have the tea," I could be asking my shopping partner if they have placed a box of tea in the shopping cart. I don't know how one would indicate this kind of specificity in Russian.
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Is it wrong to ask: Do you drink tea? I am not an English native speaker, so I answered the question that way, but Duolingo said it was wrong.
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"Have you tea?" is marked wrong. It's not the most common warding, but it's still perfectly cromulent.
In English "chai tea" is a specific type of tea. But in Russian чай just means tea in general. Is this caused by English borrowing chai as a way to refer to this tea because it is common in Russia? Or does Russian just call all tea by the most common type of tea? Or what else could it be? A quick search online says "chai tea" is an Indian tea so now I'm more confused.
If anyone knows the linguistics behind this word I would be very appreciative of an explanation.
Tea was brought to England and Russia from different parts of China. "Чай" and "tea" reflect different regional pronunciations of the same word. One might assume that "chai" is also the borrowing of the same word from Chinese, but this time with a more specific type of tea in mind. In fact in most countries the word for tea is some variation of "cha" or "te".