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is it only me or do most people not go around confusing olives and strawberries??
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While learning foreign languages, you can easily confuse anything. In Slovak, Czech or German, you can offend someone by using wrong synonym for eating. "Ty ješ" means the same as "ty žerieš", but the second is reserved for animals. Or as an intentional insult.
This is very confusing for a native Arabic speaker since in Arabic "zait" means oil and "tuut" means berries...
Za-eet, or z-eye-t? Can't really understand where the emphasis is when he speaks it.
From questions like this in DuoLingo I realized that I, a native speaker who knows well when to add a copula and when not to, don't know the rules and can't figure them out.
Here, what copula would you add? זה would be funny, doubling the word. I can actually imagine people doing it in speech, but it would be a mark of "weak language" and bad education.
What about adding הוא? Interestingly, it used to be done, but the two words were contracted: זהו זית. In female, formal: זוהי (a contraction of זו היא). I think both are nowadays very formal. The Female colloquial form זאתי (from זאת היא) is still used, I think (and still colloquial). The plural "אלה הם" still sounds perfectly good (אלה הם הזיתים הכי טעימים, אלה הזיתים הכי טעימים - both sound equally good to me).
Confused you enough?
Notice how much SALTIER the SMALL GREEN OVAL is than the ROUNDED RED TRIANGLE with little SEEDS on it that's SWEET.
