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- Topic: Hebrew >
- "הוא בא."
90 Comments
809
Were English pronouns difficult for you to learn? Seems it would be confusing in both directions. :)
Since Hebrew nouns have gender, "הוא"/"היא" are used to refer to inanimate objects. For example, we would refer to a "שולחן" (a table) as "הוא" because it's masculine. So sometimes "הוא" and "היא" are translated to "it".
It probably wasn't accepted because it doesn't make much sense in this context - if something is coming, it isn't an "it". It's a person/an animal, and we would use "הוא" or "היא".
2246
If you want to emphasize the fact that "the coming thing" is not a human being you could say "זה בא".
377
I think abstract nouns could also be used in such sentence, e.g. Change is coming. -> It is coming.
446
YES! :) And Arabic "hiya" is the same with "ha yod aleph" in Hebrew too...
P/S: I can't type Hebrew here because everything will be jumbled... :)
2246
The word "הוא" is the third singular masculine pronoun. Since all Hebrew nouns have a gender (either masculine or feminine), you would use this pronoun for masc. words. If you want to stress the fact that the referred noun is not a human being/animate thing you can use the pronoun "זה" ("this").
The phrase "הוא בא" means "he is coming" or "he comes". Hebrew only has three tenses - past, present, future. Hebrew does not have "to be", but they couldn't translate "הוא בא" into "he coming"... (: In short, הוא בא is in the present tense, therefore you can translate it into "he's coming"/"he comes" by the context.
It is not because of the beta, and even not because of Duolingo, I don't know the exact reason, but it seems it doesn't exist a good software to produce voice in Hebrew. I see the courses you've taken, excluding Norwegian (I have not taken that one) all the other courses have a good software for producing an artificial voice. But in Hebrew (and Esperanto and Irish, so far) the courses have a real voice actor to read the sentences, that is why the Hebrew voice does not seem robotic. Even in google translate Hebrew, Esperanto and Irish cannot be pronounced (and from that I may say state that, worlwide, there is no software available for that goal).
And about the "float over" option, I do not know how difficult would it be for Duolingo team to split the audio recorded word by word, Esperanto and Irish also don't have that option.
Have a nice day.
809
I can understand why there isn't an automatic voice for Hebrew (anywhere in the world). Because of the lack of vowels, it can't be automated. Programmers would have to program every single word in, and in that case, might as well use a real person instead. (Though it might be possible using nikud . . . I don't know enough to know if that's straightforward or not, but it can't be worse than English!)
However, that reasoning fails miserably for Esperanto. My guess is that, because it's not a natural language, there hasn't been enough demand for it yet.
I don't know enough about Irish to hypothesize why that one's missing.
158
The Memrise Duolingo Hebrew course contains the same vocabulary, with each word pronounced.
809
My understanding (I'm learning, too), is that האם is how to start a question (generally only used formally). If האם is present, the sentence is always a question.
But הוא means "he." It can translate to "He is" because there is no verb for "to be" in Hebrew (though why they suggest it for this sentence is beyond me. It seems like "He comes" would be a better translation.)
Incidentally, I'm confident about what I said about האם. As for הוא, I got most of that from the discussions here. ;)
1448
Why is there no sound i don't know what the letters mean yet its very hard to memorize them if i don't know what they sound like
809
This can help you learn the letters: https://www.memrise.com/course/1087087/hebrew-alef-bet/
It is duolingo's official course for the alphabet. It still doesn't mean you can sound anything out (the lack of vowels in Hebrew makes this difficult/impossible) but it definitely can help remember how to spell the words.
Oh, and this one will teach you the possible sounds each letter can make: https://tinycards.duolingo.com/decks/6ffe8ee7-b859-4451-834e-df28b9ed927e I don't know who made that one, but it has helped me a lot.
And this one will teach you where all the letters are on the keyboard: https://www.memrise.com/course/1636485/typing-hebrew/
795
No, because "he" is not implied. בא is masculine singular form, which is used for all three pronouns in the singular - אני, אתה, הוא so the pronoun is needed to make it clear who is coming. So, it would be אני בא "I come/I am coming", אתה בא "you come/you are coming" or הוא בא "he comes/he is coming".