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- "Give me a bicycle."
"Give me a bicycle."
Translation:Дайте мне велосипед.
24 Comments
17
I just realized through this whole exercise ive been leaving out the word "мне", but have been getting it right. Is that necessary? Is it more formal to include it? How do the rules of that work?
922
if there's no other pronoun, it's implied that you mean me/мне. A native speaker should tell if there's any difference in style. I'd say it's pretty much the same
12
I'm confused as to why it isn't Дайте мне велосипеду. Give me a duck is "Дайте мне утку" and Give me your plate please is "Дайте мне вашу тарелку, пожалуйста".
I thought maybe because ducks are animate and bikes are not. The only other difference between the ducks and plates sentence I see is "your, вашу". Would "give me your bike" be "дайте мне вашу велосипеду"...? Or do bikes just never change endings for some reason?
Велосипед is inanimate (=it is not alive) masculine noun. So accusative =nominative. Accusative takes pronoun "ваш" which follows same rule as the following noun. This rule is same for all inanimate masculine examples. If it was animate then accusative=genitive (e.g. "Дайте мне вашего кота"). Meanwhile, утка and тарелка are feminine nouns and it doesnt matter if they are animate or not, they will both always take ending "у" in accusative.
Not for our purposes, apparently. The sentences they are teaching us need to be grammatically correct, but not necessarily "polite requests". The note (before the lesson) says that the Russian "I want some" verbs are softer than in English, but that "please" is still necessary for "polite requests":
I WANT SOME
Russian has two main verb form patterns, which we are going to introduce soon. Unfortunately, the verb «хоте́ть»(to want) is irregular and mixes both. On a brighter note, it is a very common verb, so you'll memorize it eventually.
The other notable thing is that it does not have a strong connotation of 'need', unlike the English verb '"want". Similarly, the Russian verb for "give"(да́ть) is totally OK for polite requests. Just use it with «пожа́луйста».
304
Great to find this info here, as the notes before the lesson are not accessible from the mobile app.
Спасибо. Of course in English we don't have the polite form of imperatives to use. It's a bit like хочить - "I want" is considered too direct in English so I was always told that я хочу means "I would like". It doesn't, but that's the phrase you would probably use in English when asking for something
681
Am I correct in this following assumption?
"Дай" - the command "give", but to a person with whom the speaker has a close relationship
"Дайте" - the command "give", but to either: 1, a person with whom the speaker has a formal relationship with (like a boss or a teacher); or 2, a group of people