"У женщины есть кошки."
Translation:The woman has cats.
63 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
In your example "У меня нет кошки" you have both, the subject and the object on Genitive?
While in other exmple like: "У девочки есть брат" is only the subject what change to Genitive?
My questions are=
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why is "девочки " the subject? I notice that there is a formula of " у + GENITIVE + есть" but can anyone explain me why is the girl the subject instead of the cat? In English the girl is the subject and the cat is the predicate (object).
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if it is a negative "есть" ( у + noun + нет) both become "negative "?
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To write "The girl has a cat", Russian puts "There is a cat by the girl" with sentence order "By the girl there is a cat" (У девочки есть кошка). So you can see that "cat" is the subject of the sentence and "girl" is a prepositional object. Objects of у are genitive.
In the negative you have "By the girl there is no cat" (У девочки нет кошки). нет ("there is no") also causes the next word to be genitive, so that's why we have both nouns genitive.
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"The woman has a cat"
Why it is incorrect if according to the translation кошки also means "a cat"?
I edit, instead of delete, in case someone else makes the same question.
I realized that it's because кошки means "cats" in nominative and "cat" in genitive. To recognize them you have to look at the phrase. In this case, it has a "У" and a "есть" and those words requires a genitive word.
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That's right. What's tricky about these sentences is the Russian word order. If the sentence started with есть as in Есть кошки у женщины - literally: There are cats by the woman - no one would get confused. In that ordering we can clearly see that "cats" is nominative and only "woman" is affected by the preposition to become genitive.
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Well, according to the rules, in nominative, the plural words ends with "ы", "и", "а" and "я". Sadly, mostly singular genitive words, also ends with the same letters, so many times is confusing. Specially with femenine words. The only way to notice the difference, it's looking for "hints". Like in this case, that is the "У" that always requires genitive.
I hope that this helps.
Would you mind translating what your wrote? I'm still confused.
You wrote: У женщины есть кошки. (singular) - Does this mean: The woman has cats (or?) (when you say singular, are you referring to the woman?)
You wrote: У женщин есть кошки. (plural) - Does this mean: The women have cats (or?) (when you say plural are you referring to the women...or the cats?)
Thanks for your time and clarification!
The question was how to distinguish between genitive singular and plural. "The woman has vs the women have". I answered that question.
Woman/women женщины/женщин is the genitive. Cats hasn't changed in my examples. The word is always the same, кошки, nominative plural.
У женщины есть кошки. (singular) is the original sentence. The translation is given already by Duo. "The woman has cats." The second sentence is the plural and is the other example that had been asked for. У женщин есть кошки - The women have cats.
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Feminine nouns usually have the same -ы/и form in the genitive singular and the nominative plural, which can cause some confusion.
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Is it just me or does the audio for 'кошки' sound like it ends with an a? I cannot differentiate between кошки and кошкa.
Yes, the audio is wrong, it says "кошке" (but not "кошка"!) instead "кошки".
Listen to:
https://forvo.com/word/кошка/#ru
https://forvo.com/word/кошки/#ru
https://forvo.com/word/кошке/#ru
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I wrote this and it was counted as correct: У женщину есть кошки. ЖенщинУ! Why did it count it as correct? It should be женщинЫ. Женщину was marked correct in another exercise too!
The verb "have" is conjugated as a compound structure "У owner (genitive) есть object (nominative)". It can, and will, get more complicated when other sentences add pronouns such as "this" and the negative is a bit different than that but "У" will always be present. I'm level 8 in Russian and that's the way I understand it so far. I hope that helps.
it's just the way russians compose this sentences. in the infinite wisdom of rick of rick and morty, "don't think about it". it's not like all sentence structures in english make sense either when you think about them. especially the supposed "simple, common sentences". but as you speak english for years, or maybe even lifetime, you just don't notice the weird constructions anymore. as example, why would there be "welcome" in "you're welcome"? it's not like I got here, but I bet that one doesn't bother you.
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Russians have a verb that means "have" but they have a casual way of avoiding it where instead of saying "The woman has cats" they say what literally translates as "By the woman there are cats". у means by.
well cats is and can only be plural. the reason word cat sometimes sounds same as cats in russian, is cause of declensions. if i'm not mistaken, russian has 6 different cases. nominative you get answering questions "who" or "what" and it's basically the dictionary form of a noun. that would be "кошка" for singular, and "кошки" for plural.
this lesson is on genitive, which indicates possession, so you get it as answer to questions "to whom it belongs". so if you wanted to say that something belongs to a singular cat, you would say "у кошки естъ". if you meant to say that multiple cats have something, you'd go with "у кошек естъ".
in this particular case, it's not about what cat has, as cat is the object being owned by a woman, so the woman is in genitive, and cat is in nominative.
in fact, the very word "whom" is the remnant of the time long since passed, when english too used cases. my native tongue has 7 cases, and you don't really think which case should be used when, you just learn it as a kid and use it as the only possible way to form a meaningful sentence. despite that, trying to learn russian or german, isn't made any easier, because, cases are never easy when you are learning a language. you just apply rules until you get the feel for it, and after a while, you won't have to think about it, you'll just use proper case cause it's the only one that makes sentence sound normal.
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I'm not a Russian expert, but woman is not plural here but possessive. Your sentence would probably be: у женщин есть кошки Welcome to Russian, never ending complexity and exceptions to the myriad of rules
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your system is not working and your microphone does not work. I lost two hearts due to your mistake. If it hapoens again then I will stop learning.
I don't get this. Why does it translate у женщины есть кошки, with The woman (singular) has cats??? Isn't женщины plural??? And if not the case in genitive, then how do I tell/write the difference between one woman and multiple women, if i can't use the actual plural form??? I wish this app would give more explanations to grammar rules...
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женщины is the plural form and also the genitive singular form. There's a separate form for genitive plural which is женщин. So "The women have cats" is У женщин есть кошки.