"Где деньги моих учеников?"
Translation:Where is my students' money?
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Hmm, not a big thing I guess but in the English answer it should be " students' " with an apostrophe (talking about the 'pick the right words from this selection' exercise here - don't know if that's already the answer in other exercises).
I'm amazed at how awkward this one is for me with that missing apostrophe. It's not just grammatical nitpicking, that little mark has a significant meaning, and I can't immediately see the "correct" answer in the set of words I've been given, even when I understand the Russian sentence.
To be fair, if someone was keen enough on consuming their grandma that a simple grammatical mistake can set them off, you've got some bigger problems on your hands.
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In Russia we have an expression from a Soviet cartoon "В стране невыученных уроков" ("In the country of unlearned lessons"): Казнить нельзя помиловать! literal translation: execute not pardon. Казнить нельзя, помиловать! v Казнить, нельзя помиловать! (You can’t execute, have mercy! v Execute, no mercy!)
Same in Norwegian "Heng ham ikke, vent til jeg kommer!" (eng. "Hang him not, wait till I arrive!") where moving the comma before/after "ikke" (not/don't) makes all the difference for the poor guy...
I also stumbled. It helps me to mentally translate the genitive using "of", rather than using 's (eg "the money of the students").
Agreed. "my student's money" implies one student, "my students' money" implies multiple. It took me a good few seconds to figure out the answer the system wanted me to give, without the aposteophe.
I can confirm that there is an apostrophe there in the incubator. Any apostrophical problems in this sentence are due to automated Duo behavior which we don't have any control over.
Katie - as with most of the others in this string - is correct. The apostrophe is required because it signifies the genetive or possession 'the money of my students' - regardless of whether it sounds awkward or not. True it's not idiomatic and would be regarded as quaint or awkward - but is correct and references to whom the money belongs. Principal problem with duolingo is that it is a software program written by Americans who of course think they speak English - which sadly is very far from reality!
Please don't tar all Americans with the same brush. Some of us are quite literate. (And I feel obliged to note that the notion that any one version of English is 'better' or 'worse' than another is simply not correct. They have merely evolved in different directions and will likely eventually become distinct languages from a common root, as the Romance languages have evolved from Latin.)
Get this, this is funny. I wrote "Where is my students' money?" And it corrected me, saying the correct answer is "Where is my students money?" But then it offered "Where is my students' money?" as "another correct solution." :-D
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In English it is either "where is my students' money?" or "Where is the money of my students?", i.e., without an apostrophe in the latter phase.
"Where is my students' money?" is correct. "Where is the money of my students?" is awkward.
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since the russian course has been known to not accept answers without quotation marks etc., it's quite annoying that the plural possessive is constantly marked wrong
God, this robot pronunciation (учынэков?) is atrocious, couldn't they pay to record it
The answers in the incubator are correct, report a bug: https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
Ha! Absent the apostrophe, I was thinking of this as a very different story, missing a comma instead:
"Where is my money, students?"
I type in the same, word for word, including the apostrophe (') and I get error?
https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
The answers we have entered are correct. All we can do at this point is report the bug until Duo fixes it.
I finally got through! The apostrophe needs to be at the end of the "s" not between the "s" and the "t"; meaning it is the money of all of the students not just one particular student. Caveat scholasticus!
Oh, yeah. The intricacies of English punctuation :-) There have been issues with Duo choking over punctuation though, including this sentence, so you know what to do if it happens again.
