"У ребёнка несколько синих карандашей."

Translation: The child has several blue pencils.

[kpagcha]

why can't you say "the kid has some blue pencils"? In this manner "some" means "several" or "a few".

[Treilly2]

I had the same question

[geneven]

I suppose it could be claimed that "some" has no upper limit, whereas "several" or "a few" indicates a small number. Some could be five million.

[BenYoung84]

Like geneven I agree that it's better to keep "some" separate. Несколько can mean several or a few but some has a different shade of meaning.

[BBame]

Х

[MattinMaverick]

What is the difference between Несколько, Немного?

[benhoch13]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I thought ребёнок and ребёнка meant male child and female child. How come duo keeps dinging me for translating these as "boy" and "girl" respectively?

[Imagini]

Because they don't mean male and female child. ребёнок means child. ребёнка is the genitive/accusative. (In this Duo sentence it's genitive.)

[MoscowJoe]

After "у" you should look for a word in the genitive

[BBame]

Х

[BBame]

Х

[TreeView]

What is the spelling rule for this adjective? I thought it would be синых

[BenYoung84]

синий is the base (masculine singular) form. It is a soft stem adjective so all of the adjective endings are like the (perhaps more common) hard stem adjectives except that the the first letter of the ending is the paired soft vowel. It works the same way as hard and soft nouns.