22 Comments
I didn't know how to make "night in cafe" into a sensible phrase because "a night in the cafe" isn't a saying or anything, as far as I know.
He spends his nights in a café, or a night in a café. In Russian café tends to mean a more casual restaurant/bar rather than coffee house.
Yeah i did the exact same thing. This is really just a sentence fragment. You need more context.
For some reason duolingo isn't recognizing input from my mic. It's just automatically saying incorrect after I click the button. It won't even let me speak. Is this a current issue or something?
It seems to pronounce кафе here as "kafe" instead of "kafye" - as if it ended with Э and not Е.
Is this because it is a borrowed foreign word, or is the audio just incorrect? I am not sure how I should pronounce it.
Кафе is a loanword, so it's pronounced «кафэ».
Э is only consistently used after vowels and in the beginning of words. After consonants, Э is often replaced by Е.
This happens to loanwords: интерне́т 'Internet' (pronounced интэрнэт), тест 'test' (pronounced тэст), стелла 'monument' (pronounced стэлла), ге́незис 'genesis, origin' (pronounced ге́нэзис, colloquially генэ́зис).
In newer loanwords, both Э and Е can be written: both фле́шка and флэ́шка are possible to write 'USB flash drive'. In older loanwords, only Е is considered correct (it's a mistake to write кафэ even though it's pronounced this way).
However, many loanwords are naturalised in Russian, and then a normal Е is pronounced: текст 'text', сема́нтика 'semantics'.
So, when seeing a Е after a consonant in a loanword, there's no real way of knowing its pronunciation. Luckily, Russian speakers don't know it, either. :D We have a lot of variation, so some people would pronounce квест 'quest (type of games)' as квэст, while others would say квест. So, if you pronounce those words as they are written, it would be perfectly understandable.
When vowels like that are unstressed, they soften the consonant that precedes them, but the y sound won't be as prominent.
I also found this confusing, who would spend a night in a cafe? Didn't make any sense to me.
Maybe if the place closes down for the night, while u r passed out drunk in the restroom...
noch' v kafe.. would be a correct transliteration... I really hate the need for a Russian keyboard. Why does this happens? Is no one taking care of reports??
Its been a long day. I decided to spend the night over at old joe's. yea. I spent my ноёь в кафе (night in the cafe). A dame, mid twenties, walked over to the barista. Two coffees, to go. She left without saying hello. I knew her...once. I decided to go back home, soend the rest of the night, pondering life on the rooftop. The stars were oh so different that night...because that night i left this world, to join them.
