"У меня болит голова, и я иду в аптеку купить лекарство."
Translation:I have a headache and I am going to the drugstore to buy medicine.
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medicine is a noun that refers to any type of medicine or medicines - so that you do not have to be specific whether its a tablet, tablets, capsules, bottles, herb(s) etc. It is a commonly used word in English and this expression is a very natural one in English.
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This word has the same form in accusative as in nominative, and we use singular form here because we need only one sort of medication - a painkiller. https://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%BE
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I would never expect a discernible difference between лека́рство and лека́рства, no? Yeah, can be bang your head against a wall stuff on the "transcribe what TTS says" sentences, but I fear doing anything about it would require a structural upgrade to all of Duolingo. I think the occurrence of those questions is out of the course creators' control.
EDIT: mods can disable the "transcribe" exercises for sentences where it would be a problem or request that Duo staff add the additional phonetically indistinguishable version to the system.
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Sore head??! Why does this system not understand the word 'sore'?! And 'drugstore' instead of 'pharmacy/chemist'...hurts more than microsoft's squiggly line under 'colour', man...
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I agree. I live in Scotland and people often say "I have a sore head", instead of "I have a headache", but the meaning is the same.
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Damn it, I'm also Scottish. This isn't furthering our argument: now it looks like a wee expression only a handful of Scots use...damn you, Patrick!! :D
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Sorry! I actually grew up in England and so I've noticed lots of subtle differences. For example down in the south of England we would contract the phrase "I will not" as "I won't", while in Scotland many people (and now me in fact) contract it as "I'll not"....
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I've always said "I won't". Maybe that's from being American though. Perhaps other people say "I'll not" and I've just never noticed. I'll pay attention now!
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"Drugstore" is the American word. Duolingo is an American site and uses American English as the primary translation. I would report "sore head" not being accepted.
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Nah just playin', it actually accepts 'pharmacy', correction changed it tho when 'sore head' was marked wrong :P I usually call it the 'chemist', but i didnt dare push my luck...
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I would have used "chemist" and reported it if not accepted. I've done it on one or two other sentences.
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<<в аптеку, чтобы купить лекарство>> would also work here, right?
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I just assumed that to express your purpose for an action, you would always use чтобы. When is it acceptable not to, or is it just something that is commonly left out?
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British alternatives must be reported if not accepted. Duo has to learn. Now, wouldn't many of us say "buy some medicine" instead of just "medicine"? Duo accepts if we say "I don't have any potatoes" instead of "I don't have potatoes." It's the same thing.
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In this course at least, saying "some medicine" generally equates to using partitive case (usually genitive) which would be "лекарства". This sentence doesn't do that. This isn't a British thing. Americans also might say "buy some medicine". There isn't really much difference, and there isn't much between using partitive or not in the Russian. But one is what was said and the other isn't.
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''I have a headache and am going to the chemist to buy medicine'' (without the repetition of 'I' before 'going'), should be an acceptable translation; it is better English.
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The English sentence feels a little contrived, probably more because of the conjunction, but you could definitely say it. The second "I" is not painfully awkward. Russian could include or drop "я" as well but this sentence included it.
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Actually, this sentence sounds a bit awkward in Russian. If I just have decided to go to the chemist and want to say about it to my relatives, I would say "У меня болит голова, схожу в аптеку <за таблетками | купить обезболивающее | купить что-нибудь от головы>". If I am already going to the chemist and someone is calling and asking where I am, I would say "<Иду | Ушел | Пошел> в аптеку за таблетками от головы>
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This use of the infinitive купить to express purpose: can we do this with every verb to express purpose, or just verbs of motion? E.g. can I say "я ем жить" (I eat to live)?
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This sentence has болит as a verb, so голова is accusitive? (as opposed to something like у меня боль головы or голова мне болит which never exist?)
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No, in fact голова is nominative and is the subject here. It's like saying "my head hurts".
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Right. Accusitive = голову. So 'to me (there is) head (that) hurts'. But never боль головы?
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I wouldn't be confident enough to say never. But Google finds 400,000 results for болит голова and only 14,000 for боль головы, none of which that I saw (though I didn't look far) were "у меня боль головы" type sentences.
I put "I have a headache and I am going to the drugstore for medicine." and it didn't accept it. Couldn't the fact that you are going to buy it be implied? What I put is how I would normally say it.
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In anything like common use, this is certainly true. But on recent commercials for headache drugs, it seems like there is an effort to treat 'headache' as uncountable. "For those who suffer from headache..." It sounds very strange, and I suppose there is likely a commercial agenda behind it. Although, it may also just be a longstanding professional use that has never caught on (at all) in common parlance.
For now, I would certainly endorse the decision not to accept it without an article.
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We can tell which of us spends all our time watching TV... :-p The usage is somewhat different in that case, I think - it's talking about having headaches regularly, I guess? Even so I would expect the plural there.
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It's really "a headache". In other Germanic languages (Dutch, German) it's uncountable. I fell into that trap. In English usage might have varied over time. Strangely, "toothache" had been provided as a counterexample in a forum. While I can imagine several of my teeth aching - so that I can count my "toothaches"-, I can't think so of several of my heads. ;)
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"I have two headaches" sounds... fine - well, except for all that pain.
[in different parts of the head, for example; or, certainly in the past for two separate occurrences]
ETA: fine grammatically (lost my train of thought before) but, yes, the meaning would be... unusual. I can imagine having two sharp pains in the head at two different points and calling it "two headaches" but this is not to imply I've ever heard of anything of the sort.
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Well, I can't imagine counting headaches like that. But it does sounds fine to say, e.g. "I often have headaches".
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In the US a sore head would likely mean a grudge, or pain from trauma to the head rather than a headache.
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Besides referring to one person's bout of suffering, "a headache," the word is the name for the affliction and can be used in the singular or plural, like "migraine." Colloquially we'd probably (in the US) say "I get headaches a lot" or "I have terrible migraines." But you might ask the pharmacist or a doctor, "What would you recommend for migraine."
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Good point. I could see putting the word 'headache' in your final sentence. I recall the line from the commercial was something like "for those who suffer from headache". This still strikes me as well outside common use. Sort of like those scenesters who have taken to stripping the amicable plurale tantum from good ole jeans (only odder).
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Since this just popped up again, I would add, yes, an indefinite one :)
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The replies to this are madness. I don't know what country you are all from, but in New Zealand at least, "headache" is never ever uncountable, no exceptions. "I have headache" just sounds like someone who is not very good at speaking English.
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Well if it helps any, I presume you'll never, ever see "у мне." To my knowledge, it would be completely ungrammatical, but I'll leave that definitive judgement to native speakers.
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I put pharmacy instead of drugstore. What's the difference??? My answer was correct!
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A hospital or a grocery store can have a pharmacy, but probably not a drugstore. I leave it to native speakers to address if or how this distinction is manifested in Russian.
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Does болит голова always mean "headache?" If so, how would I say that I have some other sort of pain in my head, like a concussion? Or do other sources of pain always come with their own special words? I'm just thinking that the literal translation in English would be closer to "my head hurts", which could imply more serious problems than a headache.
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"... to buy drug", singular is not correct British usage, but "... to buy medicine." is correct. (Native Brit)
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"to buy drug" doesn't work in the U.S. either (0 occurrences in the Corpus of Contemporary American English); if the system is suggesting that, I'd think the relevant sentence should be removed from the list of valid translations.
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Trying to remember the correct words in this whole section is painful. "Sore head" sometimes works, sometimes not; "chemist" is not usually accepted; even "pharmacy" was not accepted here. I've reported about 20 exercises in the last 10 minutes. I hope that these Americanisms get sorted out too, because it makes these exercises doubly difficult for the majority of English-speakers.
Sorry for the rant.
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I can see the word "apothecary" in аптека, and i only know what that is because of playing runescape
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"I have a headache and i am going to the pharmacy to buy medicines".
Although medicine has distinct difference between sing/plural, it is still used as plural if talking about unknown substance for an ache/illness. If you know exactly what pill/medicine you are in need of then singular would fit.
I might be wrong but think this is how it generally works both for english and Swedish.
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In my variety of American English at least, "buy medicines" here would be unusually specific. Of course, in principle it's possible if you know you need to buy more than one variety of medicine, but even then, I probably wouldn't generally make the distinction, "medicine" frequently being used as a mass noun. In any case, "лекарство" is singular, which forecloses the plural possibility.
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Is аптека the nominative form of apothecary? (Closest thing to the actual word)
