"Это книги твоего ученика?"
Translation:Are these your student's books?
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Это is a free-standing pronoun:
- [{Это} {книги твоего ученика}?] Are these your student's books?
Эти is a modifier to «книги»:
- [{Эти книги} {твоего ученика}?] Are these books your student's?
So why would the latter not be accepted if the two questions are essentially the same?
I think Duolingo generally wants you to use the closest grammatical structure, and doesn’t allow changing the grammatic structure if there is a more-or-less clear correspondence between Russian and English grammar.
The construction "[noun] of [person]" sounds a bit unnatural. English speakers are much more likely to say "my father's letters" than "the letters of my father" which sounds archaic. In fact, the former makes it sound to me like the letters are about, rather that addressed to, the father.
How do I know, that this is a question? What would "these are your student's books" look like?
No idea what the last two words were but got them right just from pronunciation; but misspelled это (эта).
Thanks for the English spelling they will accept! Tried all kinds of combinations and got stuck.
does “are these books your student’s ” mean the exact same thing as “are these your student’s books” ?
They don't mean exactly the same thing and the Russian translation of the former would be: Эти книги твоего ученика
In English it does; but there may be different ways of structuring these in Russian. Then again, "Are these the books of your student?" seems to be the literal translation, so both English sentences may well be structured this way in Russian.
It's not feminine, it's masculine. Masculine genitive endings are usually -а, which is why it might look feminine.
