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- "Το χρώμα του καρπουζιού."
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I'm somewhat confused by this (first) lesson on possessives...
Does the του imply the definitive article, i.e. 'the watermelon'? And how to say 'of a watermelon, Το χρώμα του ένα καρπουζιού, and how to say 'the color of watermelon'? And finally, would Το χρώμα του το καρπουζιού be grammatically incorrect?
Sorry for this battery of questions, but some clarification would be appreciated.
Etymologically, το is the nominative and του is the genitive of the definite article, so 'του το' would be like saying 'the the' in English. I think I'm right in saying that 'the colour of the watermelon/of watermelon' is ambiguous enough in Greek that του καρπουζιού covers both depending on context.
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I think using the accusative form of "the" implies "of" ... or roughly speaking "tou" translates as "of the". Please correct me if I'm wrong - I've just spent 4 hours revising this lesson and my head feels like cotton wool instead of enlightenment LOL :-)
I've noticed for awhile that inflection of many of the spoken words doesn't match the placement of accents in the written words. For example, in this exercise, κσρπουζιού is pronounced as καρπούζιου.
If those pronunciations are incorrect, then we're being taught wrong and the pronunciations need to be fixed. But I've submitted this as a correction/complaint, and if any correction was made, I can't tell. And if the actual pronunciations do differ from what's written, they need to explicitly tell us that.
Unfortunately, only a few of the words that are taught in this course have some kind of problem with their pronunciation, and this is not one of them.
We've noticed that some learners don't get the concept of an accent. In the word καρπουζιού, you can tell that the last two syllables are pronounced almost with the exact same intensity, but the emphasis is given on the very last one when you speak. You have to place an accent where it's supposed to be placed, otherwise, there would have been more than one or two accents in each word. I can assure you that the written accent always matches the pronunciation in speech.
The course is literally filled with reports of accents missing or accents that should've been elsewhere, but honestly, you just can't place the accent wherever you want. There are rules for that.
Not sure if it's already been reported but there's an error with the pronunciation of "καρπουζιού". Sounded like something completely different and I'm guessing if it caused me to get an incorrect answer then it may have done the same for others.
Yep the audio on καρπουζιού is really bad. It's not (just) a word stress issue, it's garbled.
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Oh! Got it. Thought "tou" was just "of". I'll revise from whre I first learnt "tou" Thanks!
