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- Topic: Italian >
- "Lui ricorda suo fratello."
29 Comments
Yes. Spanish actually does have the same small difference between the words recall and remember in their two terms acordarse and recordar. I don't think it would come into play here, but I just confirmed that doesn't exist in Italian anyway.
I wrote," Lui recuerda suo fratello. " Given lack of any other context and listening to the voice, this seems like an acceptable translation.
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Why doesn't the possessive require the definite article? Why isn't it "Lui ricorda il suo fratello" like all the other sentences I've seen?
can someone explain to the difference in context when using 'suo'. As far as I knew it could mean either his or her. I don't understand how to know the difference when using it in a sentence
Context, here the sentence starts with "Lui", therefore it can only be his and not her.
suo could be his, hers or its. I chose his and the answer was counted as incorrect
Sentence seems kind of sad to me. Maybe because i have a brother who passed and this hits me
Why is "Lui ricorda il suo fratello" marked as incorrect? (Nov 29th 2019)
In the possesion module, it was stressed that you need an article somewhere in the sentence, for words like "suo" to convey possesion. So why is this not "Lui ricorda il suo fratello". Is it simply that the brother doesn't 'belong' to him, but is just connected to him?
When it's a family member, the article is dropped. The exception is with loro only. If we make this plural you would have Loro ricordano il loro fratello.
the voice sounds like he is saying erricordo. Listened to it S L O W L Y 5 times.
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I wrote "he remembers her brother" just to test if that was correct as well and it was. Is there a way to say "he remembers his brother" in a way that you can be sure it is his own brother he remembers? Or do you always have to infer that from the context?
You always infer it from context, even in English. In the sentence He remembers his brother, it is even possible that "his" does not even mean belonging to the subject "he". Theoretically it could be another male's brother, but that would only occur to us if that was what the context suggested. In Italian, the third person possessive pronoun would be assumed to refer to the third person subject unless context dictated otherwise. But obviously with more possibilities of meanings, context will dictate otherwise more often.
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Thanks! You are right about English. In my mother language (finnish) we have a different way of saying "his brother" for when we are talking about his own brother or someone else's. We never have to infer it from the context
That's interesting. The only thing I know about Finnish is that it's not an Indo-European language and that it's related to Estonian. But since I don't know Estonian, the latter doesn't help. I speak a fair number of languages, but they mostly are Germanic or romance languages. It's a rather small corner of a very big pool.
It is not uncommon to hear the wrong thing, even in your native language. People do misspeak or enunciate poorly, and sometimes you just hear wrong. But it's important to learn the clues that a native speaker uses to "correct" what he hears. This sometimes happens so quickly and naturally they aren't even aware their brain made a correction. This is an easy case. Fratello is always a masculine word, and there is no word fratella. So that not only means that sua fratello is always wrong, it means we know the error has to be with sua and not fratello. This is clearly a place where an Italian speaker would self correct what he heard without thinking twice.
