"В городе четыре школы."
Translation:There are four schools in the city.
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What's wrong with "The town has four schools" ? This is the same structure DL uses with "The room has two windows." I'm confused.
Im confused. Sometimes you use есть in sentences which are translared like "... is in this city", and sometimes not. Why?
What case does школы take here, and why? My guess is nominative, since no action is being performed, but I'm not positive.
It is the Genitive singular. A "Nominative" phrase of a noun combined with a numeral uses the noun in different cases depedning on the last word of the numeral:
- 1: Nominative singular. E.g., одна школа; двадцать один дом.
- 2, 3, 4: Genitive singular. E.g., две школы; три дома; двадцать четыре этажа; тридцать три девочки
- 5 and everything else: Genitive plural: пять школ; восемнадцать школ; сто кошек.
There is no deep meaning in this system: it was born as an ad hoc solution when certain word forms disappeared (historically, Slavic languages had the "dual" number). So it "sounds right"—but would have made no sense were the Russian language to be designed from scratch a hundred years ago.
Thanks! I wouldn't say that makes sense, but now I understand at least. It's tough trying to find a way to link certain translations and grammar constructs to english when in some cases there just isn't an english equivalent
And now DL's telling me that it can be "There are four schools in the town" but not "In the town there are four schools." So, I'm really confused.
If you believe a mistake has been made and your answer is correct, use the Report a Problem button to report it, that way the course creators will see it.
Smaller towns (like, 15000–25000) do not really need more. Some have more, some do not.
Russian only has one type, which is город (like most languages, really). There is no distinction between English "town" and "city", though when translating into English we usually call our towns towns if their population is small (e.g., Volzhsk or Chekhov) or cities if it is 100+ thousand people (e.g., Chita, Surgut or, well, Moscow)
It is purely for English speakers' convenience, because 20 000 or 5 000 000 people, these are all classified as город in Russian.
Город was city. Today it's town. What changed? Should be correct.