"дом хорошей девочки"

Translation: a house of a good girl

[sara_scout]

Does this phrase feel bizarre to anyone else?

[cbpos1989]

I don't mean to go against the popular opinion of the thread, but I have to imagine the point of these bizarre sentences is to test your skills. I find that I can sometimes too easily translate common phrases and sentence just from familiar word patterns. Not properly paying attention to how that sentence was actually constructed. Whereas sentences like these really test if I have been paying attention to the proper grammar rules.

[deactivated user]

I think it's equally bizzare in Russian, so probably that works as an equivalent?.. I can't really imagine myself using it (probably when speaking to children?).

[CarlosLeye1]

yep, good to see I'm not alone in this lol, it seems both bizzare and pointless :)

[grammarpenguin]

Besides the strange semantics and children's-storybookishness, I think the English grammar is a bit weird - I can't think of when to say "a X of a Y", because it would usually be "the X of a Y" (which is accepted, though).

[YairHarris]

Definitely. I've seen some other minor peculiarities, but this one strikes me as a mistake that has to be fixed.

[SharonGBro]

It is bizarre, but I think it is on purpose. Horses are not architects, and cats don't eat eggs. The idea seems to be to get you to concentrate on the grammar. The house of a good girl might make a good movie title, but I couldn't see myself ever speaking that way.

[Kmgr84ce]

I thought девочки was plural. Shouldnt it be хорошая девочка?

[alimgo]

No, it is genitive in this sentence to show the "of" relationship.

[SharonGBro]

I think the point of the sentence it to make you understand the genitive female singular adjective and case endings. House OF a good (genitive female adjective) girl (object of the preposition OF, hence genitive female singular case). Possessive OF = genitive

[Tommy519485]

I thought ---ей was a masculine ending??? It is describing a girl?

[Alf-Sawman]

You thought wrongly :-)

In the nominative case, adjectives describing masculine noun end with -ый/-ой if the "word base" (stem) ends with a hard consonant, alternatively -ий following soft consonants.

In dative, the masculine flavour ends with -ому/-ему.

The feminine adjective ending -ой/-ей is common to genitive, dative and instrumental.

[Holly413466]

I just cannot hear девочки. It throws me every time!

[Ryan400778]

To me it sounds like девушки. I tried replaying multiple times to be sure but I only hear у (оон).

[avp59]

There is a wrong audio stress "хорошЕй" here. Here must be the stress "хорОшей". I have already explained this audio mistake that changes the mean of the word in the topic "У моей хорошей ученицы есть друзья в Москве". There is the same audio mistake there. I have sent two reports about incorrect audio in the both places there and here