"אהבה באה."
Translation:Love is coming.
179 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
Plenty of languages have the continuous (it's an aspect, not a tense, though).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_and_progressive_aspects
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Rae.F, thanks for this. In my blinkered way, knowing only two languages (French and Russian) other than English, neither of which has a present continuous, I had assumed English was unique. Your wikipedia link tells me other languages have it too. But as far as I can see from this article, there's only Icelandic and Italian. I wouldn't call that "plenty". Do you know of many others?
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Ah, my mistake. I was thinking of the present continuous. Looking back over our messages, I see that was only in my mind. It was in my mind because neither French nor Russian have it, even though they have aspects for other tenses. Apologies. ...Though, actually, given that the original question (Is Hebrew like German, as in, love comes is the same as love is coming?) was referring only to the present tense, I think I might be forgiven.
More on the habitual "be" in AAVE.
It is a common misconception that AAVE speakers simply replace is with be across all tenses, with no added meaning. In fact, AAVE speakers use be to mark a habitual grammatical aspect not explicitly distinguished in Standard English. For example, to be singing means to sing habitually, not to presently be singing. In one experiment, children were shown drawings of Elmo eating cookies while Cookie Monster looked on. Both black and white subjects agreed that Elmo is eating cookies, but the black children said that Cookie Monster be eating cookies.
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Then how does be eating (=habitually) differ from the simple present - eats, which also denotes habitual action?
I speak English, Spanish and some Italian and all of those have a continuous mood. I also assume Portuguese, French, Catalan, Latin and Esperanto all have it as well. However it does make the grammar a little easier for me in Hebrew that there is no continuous mood that I have to worry about. Just got to learn to those darn letters now...
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No, French doesn't. I only know French and Russian which don't have a continuous present, so I'd ignorantly assumed most languages didn't. It's good to learn. Except when people say they assume French and Latin have it
Some dialects of German (such as Swiss German) do have a progressive aspect: "I'm eating" is "I bi am ässe" in Swiss German but "I eat a lot" (not right now) is "I ässe viel"
There is a memrise.com course called "Hebrew Alef-Bet" that helped me in reading the Hebrew letters.
it may have to do with the gender of the word since most Hebrew nouns ending in -ah are feminine (not all, but most). My Biblical Hebrew is rusty but there's also a rule concerning the fact that you can't end a word with an open syllable (a CV syllable). If it ends in a vowel, there's usually an -h or an aleph at the end
The "Aleph" letter is a "glottal stop". A glottal stop happens, for instance, in the "uh-oh" word, or in american pronounciation for "button". Your throat litteraly closes itself for a little moment. But I think it's not wrong if you just speak without the stop. Just put the emphasis on the second letter (baÁH)
The emphasis is correct, but not neccesary. I would personally pronounce it without exaggerating the ah - like in this forvo pronunciation for "את באה לפה הרבה?" - http://he.forvo.com/search/%D7%91%D7%90%D7%94/ --- (Do you come here often? - the cliched pickup line)
Stop vs. fricative, not voiced vs. voiceless. So it's a matter of fortition vs. lenition.
http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/
do you read the whole thing left to right or just each word read seperately? (completely new to hebrew)
We read it right to left. Read this, I think you will find it helpful - https://www.duolingo.com/comment/16251269
Try going here: https://www.memrise.com/course/1087087/hebrew-alef-bet-print/1/
It's by the creators of the Duolingo Hebrew course. There's also another course for all the words: https://www.memrise.com/course/1031737/hebrew-duolingo/
IN English, anyway, you could say "love is coming" in a general way to say "you/one will experience love in the near future" though it would sound rather poetic or metaphorical. In a much more specific Christian religious context we sometimes talk about "love has come" to refer to Christ's coming into the world. I don't think that latter context is what's being referred to here, though. :)
the answer will depend on what sort of keyboard you have. Try googling "Hebrew keyboard" + Mac | Windows | Android | iPhone as appropriate.
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+do+i+get+Hebrew+letters+on+my+keyboard+%3F
Did you try clicking on the light bulb icon?
https://www.duolingo.com/skill/he/Letters-1/tips-and-notes
Hebrew is written right-to-left and generally just writes the consonants, not so much the vowels.
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Rae, speaking about reading right to left, I've been gone from Duolingo for a year and when I came back last week, I noticed that all the new, blue, Hebrew sentences at the top of the discussion pages are written backwards. Do you have any idea why this error happened, how long the problem has been going on, and why it hasn't been fixed yet? Thanks.
update 8/2019: It took months but the problem has been fixed and the words I see in the answers in blue at the top of the discussion pages are now going in the correct direction from right to left instead of left to right. Thanks Duo!
I don't know why you're asking me. I haven't done Hebrew for a while and I'm not one of the course contributors. But I took a quick look at the top of this page and it's not backwards.
If you think there's a problem, you'll need to take a screen shot and submit a bug report.
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I asked you because you are a frequent and knowledgeable contributor who has been on the site more recently than I have. I thought you might have been following a discussion or heard some other way about this issue. The Hebrew in blue at the top of this page reads "באה אהבה" instead of "אהבה באה" on my computer. I turned in a bug report a couple of days ago but, since Duolingo does not respond back to individual bug reports, I was hoping someone else had an idea what is causing the problem and if it can be fixed.
Go here: https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/17767515 And follow the links for whatever browser you're using.
There is no audio when selecting the words to compare with the original recording that we are supposed to try to write in Hebrew. This seems too difficult when there is no beginning alphabet to try to discern the letters, no audio to compare each word to the original phrase, and none of the words have been strongly taught in a previous lesson. Please fix to make it more fair to the learner. It is frustrating and discouraging to have to guess entire words and phrases over and over without having learned individual words or letters from the phrases. This is only one of the first lessons in the very first skill tree, yet we are supposed to understand an entire sentence orally and select the corresponding words visually with zero audial context.
Yes, it is a downside of this course. Your best bets are to learn the letters and then the words covered by Duolingo via the associated Memrise courses: https://www.memrise.com/course/1087087/hebrew-alef-bet-print/ https://www.memrise.com/course/1031737/hebrew-duolingo/
Also make sure you check the tips and hints pages for each skill.
And be aware that the comments pages are not monitored by the Devs so if you want to bring something to their attention, you need to flag it.
Yes - it's depends on their placement in the word. If you use the website, rather than app, you'll get better access to the tips and hints where it's all explained. If you can't access that, go here https://duome.eu/tips/en/he for all the tips and hints for the course.
No, it doesn't for the Hebrew course because of the way that they recorded the audio. The audio is of people reading whole sentences rather than individual words that can be spliced together.
If you want to hear how an individual word is pronounced, try forvo.com or the memrise course that matches the Duolingo Hebrew course - try starting here: https://www.memrise.com/course/1031737/hebrew-duolingo/1/
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Rae.F, though there may be plenty of places online for learning the Hebrew alphabet, I'd like to say that the Duolingo introduction to - I mean the first lessons in - Arabic are a dream. You learn the alphabet without even noticing that you are. Totally painless. Congratulations Duolingo! What a shame you haven't done it for Hebrew.
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It's very easy to shame things you don't know enough about. Did you know Hebrew was made as the first non-alphabet language course on Duolingo? That was done years before Arabic, which was made on the new platform, which was made after they realized Hebrew was not user friendly, in order to support other such languages. The course creators have states several times already that transferring the Hebrew course onto the new platform would require an entirely new tree, not just a small upgrade. And a new tree takes a lot of effort and time, because they are all volunteers.
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danny912421, thank you for the information, which explains a lot. But how was I to know? Arabic was my first experience with Duolingo (lucky me), so I was spoiled. My heart goes out to the course creators, if they have people like me complaining all the time!
In the tips, it says, "A common example for the use of "א" as a silent letter is the word לא (/lo/), which means "no"." I don't understand why it's called "silent" when it seems to represent "o"???
Follow that double asterisk back up to the notes on aleph:
(usually silent or similar to the letter "a" in English: a placeholder for vowels)
This is not really an alphabet. It's an abjad (albeit an "impure" one), just like Arabic. The aleph/alif can hold the short vowel points (niqqud), written or not.
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Lovely! The REPLY function has reappeared. Thank you veyr much for this interesting link, which I'll read tomorrow (it's past 1am in London). (I'm proud to say I knew about abjad, becasue of learning Arabic - so why do they call it the Hebrew alphabet?) I still think that this statement - "A common example for the use of "א" as a silent letter is the word לא (/lo/)" is not helpful. Good night!
Yes, Duolingo cuts off replies after a certain depth, which is why I replied to your highest-level comment.
Abjads and abugidas are subtypes of the general category "alphabet". That and not a whole lot of people know those words, so it's easier to just over-simplify and call them alphabets.
And yeah, perhaps they could re-word that a bit. What they mean is that א holds the "o" vowel. If you scroll down the Omniglot link a little bit, there's a section where it talks about niqqud and shows the diacritics.
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Rae.F, I tried the link you give, but it's circular: it takes me back to this very page. Did you mean to give a different link? I had assumed you were directing me to where this subject had been discussed in the past.
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Rae.F, yes, I hadn't replied to your other post, but there wasn't any point. I always look at Tips, but my point was that in the Arabic course, the course creators make it very easy for you. Here, it's quite hard and boring to go through the alphabet and teach yourself the letters without any help. Incidentally, I see that the Hebrew course has the same irritating feature of the Arabic one (and probably all of them), that at a certain point, the REPLY function disappears, ,and you have to find a different message to reply to. However, Duolingo is very good at alerting the addressee of a new reply, even if it doesn't follow immediately after the addressee's message. I don't suppose you know any app that babies you along to learn the Hebrew alphabet?
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In the tips, it says, "A common example for the use of "א" as a silent letter is the word לא (/lo/), which means "no"." I don't understand why it's called "silent" when it seems to represent "o"???