"Dá n-ólfá mo bheoir cheannódh sí ceann eile dom."
Translation:If you drank my beer she would buy another one for me.
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"If you would drink my beer, she would buy me another one."
Wouldn't this work too? It seems fine to me, especially since the hint for "n-ólfá" is "you would drink".
Sometimes it just seems to be made harder than it really is. I'm starting to understand why so many give up.
It's not being "made harder than it really is" - this is a real difference between the way Irish and English handle this type of sentence.
The purpose of this exercise isn't simply to see if you can figure out what the Irish sentence means (using a grammatically dubious literal translation), but also to help you understand that in English a conditional sentence with an if-clause in the simple past and a main-clause in the present conditional ("If you drank my beer she would buy another one for me") is perfectly normal, but in Irish you don't mix tenses like that, and both clauses are in the conditional.
638
Haven't had this one come up for a while. Of course, I went for the hyper-correct If you were to drink etc, as I did last time. Grr.
So whats the difference between past and present conditional irish translation? "If you had drank" ( which i guess would be inperfect tense?) Vs. "If you would drink"
- 638
"If you would drink" would be unnatural in the UK, except perhaps among some younger speakers influenced by American films. "If you were to drink" or "Were you to drink" would be accurate but a bit archaic. "If you drank" fits the bill.