"You drink tea with milk?"
Translation:Ты пьёшь чай с молоком?
46 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
The preposition с 'with' is followed by a noun in the Instrumental case. «Молоко́м» is the Instrumental case of «молоко́».
What is the sense in spelling пьёшь with ь after п, if there is ё after it anyways? I mean ь is used to soften the sound that proceeds it, but the п would've been softened by the ё anyway. Are there some rules that dictate when to write this seemingly redundant ь? Or does it do something and I just don't see it?
ь marks an an extra /j/: пё means /pʲo/, пьё is /pʲjo/. It's actually different in pronounciation.
It is a subtle difference: "Do you drink tea with milk" would be asking whether or not you normally take milk with your tea. It is something you would ask before giving someone their tea so that if they like milk, it may be added to the tea. "You drink tea with milk?" is more of an exclamatory expression of surprise in finding out, after the milk has already been added, that someone already added tea to their milk and you didn't expect it to have happened. Or for example "You drink tea with milk?" is something you may express to get confirmation when someone states that they want milk in their tea and you want clarification that you heard them correctly.
No, чай is the accusative case.
The accusative case of masculine nouns (except папа, Дима and other nouns that look like feminine) and plural nouns works like this:
- if the noun is animate, i.e. if it describes a living being, then accusative case is same as genitive (ви́жу слона́ 'I see an elephant'),
- if the noun is inanimate, i.e. it describes a non-living thing, then accusative case is same as nominative (ви́жу чай 'I see tea').
Note that animateness doesn't usually depend on the context. For example, if you see a statue of an elephant, you still say «ви́жу слона́», even though a statue is not living.
Other English cases where we use 'with' are also going to be good guidance even when 'c' is missing.
Weird example: 'I am hitting the boy with the milk' would be 'я бью [=hit] мальчика молоком' In this case the idea of 'with' is just implied by молоком being in instrumental case.
By comparison: "я пью чай молоком" would mean you are using the milk to drink the tea, as if it were a cup or something.
Hope that helps!
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Вы можете пьёте чай с молоком was marked incorrect. The correct version was written with informal you, which is not helpful in letting me know if i misspelled something. Is this still right?
648
Is there a particular reason that typing the "c" on my keyboard makes the answer incorrect when copying & pasting it makes it correct?
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What case of чай is чаю? I only ask because my first thought was to put чай into the Accusative Case and чаю was my first thought. However, then I remembered that masculine inanimate nouns don't decline in the Accusative, but I digress.
"чаю" is multiple cases; take a look at: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%87%D0%B0%D0%B9#Russian and 'Show' the declension.
The tips say:
With "substances"(mass nouns), the Genitive form may be used instead. It conveys the meaning of "some" quantity.
That doesn't mean you use "the genitive form in the accusative case". It means you use the genitive case when you want to say "some X" instead of "X". I.e. "Вы хотите чай?" means "do you want tea?", whereas "Вы хотите чая?" means "Do you want some tea?". Since the actual difference between these sentences is pretty much negligible, you can consider them to be two different ways to say the same thing.
However in instances where saying "some tea" doesn't make sense it equally doesn't make sense to use "чая" in Russian. You wouldn't say "You drink some tea with milk?", right?
Oh, that's interesting! As a English speaker, I had been instead interpreting those two lines as follows: "Вы хотите чай?" --> "do you want a tea?" (as in a cup of tea) vs. "Вы хотите чая?" --> "Do you want tea?" (as in any quantity of tea). I wouldn't really distinguish "I want tea" and "I want some tea" in English. Tea is already a mass noun, so saying "some tea" just makes it into a MORE specific quantity. So, to me..."Вы пьете чая с молоком?" sounds like "do you drink tea with milk?" whereas "Вы пьете чай с молоком?" sounded more like "do you drink a/the tea with milk?" (which seems a little odd).
tl;dr -- I guess "tea" is a mass noun in English, but not in Russian! Don't know why I would have assumed it was the same in both, ha! Well, now I know better. Thanks!
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why is English question without Do ? acording English grammer =Do you drink ta with milk?