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- "У моей сестры в комнате стои…
"У моей сестры в комнате стоит большая и удобная кровать."
Translation:There is a large and comfortable bed in my sister's room.
74 Comments
1327
Can you accept "large comfortable bed ..." as a correct translation? The word "and" is not often used between adjectives. Translating literally "large and comfortable bed ...." sounds strange.
45
English doesn't speak, strictly or otherwise. If you're going to be pedantic about grammar try not to get it wrong.
769
'there is a big comfortable bed in my sister's room' - is marked wrong. It sounds awkward with 'and' although that's not wrong. But what I wrote is not wrong and sounds more natural.
368
The ownership of the room is ambiguous, and also, in the Russian, we don't know for sure that my sister owns the bed, we only know it's her room.
It's really pedantic and in common use, we'd know what you mean, but I imagine Owl is trying to train us to be precise.
45
It's really frustrating when duolingo only accepts the must awkward and unlikely of many possible English translations.
368
A little disappointed that "There is a big and comfy bed in my sister's room" was not accepted, and it was the last question of the lesson, and was on my last heart. :(
36
It is a difficult question. You should just remember: стол, стул, мебель, кровать, диван, шкаф, гарнитур, холодильник, телевизор, пылесос - стоИт in a normal position. As a rule, vertical items - стоЯт, horizontal ones - лежАт, but not always. E.g. тарелка на столе - стоИт, but if we put it in the pan it would be лежит there. Птица - сидит. Костюм на человеке - сидит. Why? No one knows, I suppose. Just historically.
The bed is not the object, but the subject of the verb стоит (the verb is intransitive, which means it cannot take direct objects). And you were right assuming that the case is nominative. By the way, with feminine nouns such as кровать (ending in ь) there is no difference between accusative and nominative forms.
554
(Also reported "there is a large, comfortable bed in my sister's room" and "there is a large, comfortable bed standing in my sister's room". It's maddening when you have to make your sentence less grammatical just to pass an exercise.)
Oh sorry then, I thought for that to be explicit, you would also need "своей комнате" and that the sentence was only about the ownership of that said bed. You know, which could be anywhere after all...
To quote your response to Regdot's more recent question in this thread: "except the Russian sentence does not rule out that it can be any room anywhere as long she is using it."
235
"У моей сестры" but the voice says "У моей сёстры". Is this the correct pronounciation here please?
Literally, стоИт means “is standing” or “stands”; however, the verb стоять, as well as many other verbs such as сидеть (to sit), лежать (to lie), висеть (to hang), торчать (to stick out), валяться (to be scattered), расти (to grow), водиться (to live — speaking of animals), is used as the equivalent of “There is”. Unlike English sentences starting with “There is”, “there are”, “There was” etc., their Russian translations always start with the adverbial modifier indicating the place. In such context, any of the above verbs can be replaced with есть, but, most of the time, they are a more preferable choice.
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(Recovered comments) 1: Can I say: "in my sister's room a big and comfortable bed is standing (or stands)"?
2 AndroidKanada: I don't think this is actually ungrammatical, but it is unnatural. If you want to parallel the Russian to get a sense of the English, "In my sister's room stands a large and comfortable bed" is better, but is literary phrasing. The given translation is the best I can think of.
1: Thank you. About literary phrasing. Do you mean if a verb is first in a sentence and a noun is second - poets say like that?
2 AndroidKanada: Hmm. You're making me think about my own native language. This is a good thing, but it tickles. ))
I think the essence is this: Like Russian, English uses SVO (subject-verb-object) for neutral order, but it's stronger because we don't have noun cases to give more flexibility. Any significant departure is generally for effect. There has been a cultural shift towards simpler, informal structures and away from sophisticated structures, so the latter now sound literary or a bit archaic.
In this case, the subject is the bed, so this is an inverted sentence order. Also, English doesn't usually specify standing/lying unless it's contrary to expectations, like "There is a chair lying in the room". So these departures create an effect, which make the sentence less casual, and thus more literary or poetic.
Except for an imperative, putting the main verb first would be quite unusual in English, so that would create quite a strong effect. Any such phrasing for this sentence that I can think of would be quite contorted, meaning you could only get away with it in poetry. )))
This is my two cents worth - are there any English writing teachers here?
3 kdammers: Here is one case that is not an imperative but where the verb comes first: "Run hard, and you will win." This is another way of saying, "If you run hard, you will win."
4 Dmitry_Arch: Why, “run” is imperative here, albeit only in form, not in meaning. For such structures the most preferred Russian syntax is using the 2nd person singular forms of verbs without a subject in both parts of the sentence, e.g. «Направо пойдёшь — коня потеряешь» (if you go right, you will lose your horse).