"Когда я была маленькая, у меня не было мобильного телефона."
Translation:When I was little I did not have a mobile phone.
28 Comments
I have the same question but shall not stay here to wait for an answer; at 65 my life-expectancy is not long enough. It is an infinite shame that a course which was full of interest and has clearly been the subject of much dedicated work by its compilers in the past should have been ruined by so many inconsistencies and self-contradictions such as this: a problem which, apparently, nobody is now willing to address.
You are right. I'm Russian native speaker, and i can't get past level 9 in Russian here. Shame really.
Is there a reason it's not "Когда я была маленькой"? The only exception my Russian grammar book gives for the past tense predicate adjective-in-instrumental rule is nationalities.
For anyone who might have the same question, Shady_arc provides a detailed reply here: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/16462939
"When I was young, I never had a cellphone"
"Когда я была маленькая, у меня никогда не было мобильного телефона"?
1115
This sentence sounds like of those nostalgic stuff on internet...you know, something like: "Like if you was a 90's, 80's, 70's... kids".
why "when I was little there was no mobile phone" is not acceptable? seemed legit to me...
The sentence here is about absence of possession in the past, as opposed to non-existence.
I think yours might be a plausible translation were the "у меня" absent from the original.
We use plural in such a case (and often a different word order): Когда я была маленькая, мобильных телефонов не было.
(Notice that "было" in "не́ было" is always a clitic - an unstressed word)
Thanks! Yeah, the lack of existence would normally be plural in English, as well. In singular it strikes me as quite emphatic: a parent yelling at a child or something.
If your first language isn't English, then it will be helpful for you to know that "mobile telephone" simply isn't a common expression. To be honest, "mobile phone" is far from common any more either, at least in my part of the U.S., but in my entire life I don't think I've heard "mobile telephone" used to reference the relevant device itself. If your first language is English and that's what you say, well, that's what the report button's there for :)
Have got is not normally used in the simple past tense (had got); it is not considered correct to say *"Last year we had got a house in the city."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/have_got
I would interpret your version as being a British form (for Americans it would be "gotten") of the past perfect. Since Russian doesn't have such a thing, Russian past tense forms can sometimes be translated that way. The problem is that here it adds the meaning that you did get a cellphone later. Now, that's very likely to be true for anyone uttering this sentence. However, I think it's adding something to the Russian sentence that's not there in the original. To use your version, I think the second half of the Russian sentence ought to have had a "ещё."
Понял, спасибо. Я ещё слаб в английском, и для меня было бы достаточно и первой части Вашего ответа. Вторая же часть заставила порядком вспотеть, пока я её переводил)))
Why is не used rather than нет (I am used to the expression «у меня нет»)? I am guessing that it is to do with the past tense and that «у меня не было» is the equivalent past tense expression...
