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- Topic: Russian >
- "Я не ем ни рис, ни яблоки."
46 Comments
Immanuel David Miller, English does not ever have neither without nor. It's kind of a rule. I do not (or don't) eat rice or apples makes much more sense. :-)
I think that that is just needless perscriptivism. THe sentence should be understood as "I do not eat rice [nor do I eat] apples."
Well this is an example of using nor without neither. But there are cases where it's perfectly acceptable to do that in English, as well as the reverse. However, this is not one of them. Not just a prescriptivist thing--I can't imagine anyone saying "I don't eat rice nor apples" in real life.
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Is there any difference in pronunciation between "не" and "ни"? If the answer is no, then what's the reason?
"ни" is a shorter sound than "не". Try listening to both on Forvo.com - the difference is much clearer there.
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I love DuoLingo but many of the pronunciations, at least with Russian are terrible. Low-quality encoding and many words like ни here are chopped off on the end. As I've said in other forms I would happily pay a monthly subscription for good audio - especially since the site (and phone app) have so much awesomeness to offer.
Why aren’t the nouns also negated by using the genitive case? I.e., why isn’t this «Я не ем ни риса, не яблок»?
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As a native Spanish speaker this is easier to understand than it seems. "No como NI arroz NI manzanas"
Same. It's hard to figure a sentence out when you rely on context but don't know a text structure.
I wrote the example at the top of this page, "Я не ем ни рис, ни яблоки." and it said the first ни should be не, but that's not how it is in the example at the top of this page...So what is correct here?
"Ни...... ни" is like "neither..... nor". "I don't eat rice nor apples" doesn't make sense to me as an English speaker.
Because English doesn't accept double negations. If you use "neither", which is a negative word, you cannot use a negative sentence (with the word "don't", so you should answer: "I eat neither rice, nor apples".
The не и ни sound exactly the same is this excersice! Couldnt determine the word from the sounds!! Damn machines!
And what if I want to say "I don't eat apples." Do I translate it with or without ни? Я не ем (ни) яблоки.
How could I have known it's яблоки and not яблоко not according the audio (as it sounds nearly identical)?
"Ee" versus "ah" (the end sounds of both words) is a big difference (Unless the TTS Russian lady didn't pronounce this right, but I heard the difference clearly.).
Silly perscriptivists think it's a double negation when actually it's an ellipsis that should be interpreted as "I do not eat rice [nor do I eat] apples."
I eat neither rice nor apples = я не ем ни риса, ни яблок
The Russian sentence as given may be idiomatic (I wouldn't know) but it seems ungrammatical. According to what we are being taught, the correct declension here would be the genitive-as-partitive. The partitive of рис is риса, while the partitive of яблоки is яаблок. All in my humble, underinformed opinion, of course.
Both versions are equally correct. Using partitive is possible but not necessary here.
Are rice and apples accusative here? (I thought ни governed genitive, but obviously was wrong.)
Why not " I neither eat rice nor apples"? I'm a native English speaker, and I would tend to put it this way rather than the way Duolingo posits it; but I was marked wrong.
