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- "Αυτός ακούει τις γυναίκες."
12 Comments
What would be really useful in these kinds of sections would be access to the tables showing the relevant definite articles/noun declensions for the various gender and plural/singular combinations. Once you are actually doing the exercise you can't see them; and Greek is not a popular enough language that such tables are easy to find on the internet.
Great idea, although, actually, these tables are not hard to find; there's an abundance of them on Wiktionary!
If they don't already exist, exercices in the form of "match the pairs" for declensions might be useful.
1513
I don't get it! "Αυτή ακούει τον άντρα" means "She hears the man" and also "She listen to the man", but "Αυτός ακούει τις γυναίκες" can be translated only as "He hears the women"! "He listen to the women" was marked as wrong.
Sure in Greek there is only one way to say "hear" and "listen to" and both are correct. If some sentences were not accepted there were other problems in the sentence.
Another basic question but why does Αυτος sound like AFTOSH and not Aeetosh? Where is the F sound coming from?
The combinations αυ ευ are pronounced as /av ev/; and before a voiceless sound such as /t/ the voiced /v/ gets assimilated to a voiceless /f/, thus αυτός is /aftos/.
Since Greek has no sound like our "sh" that needs to be kept separate from "s", the realisation of /s/ can vary a bit more than in English, and may sound a bit like our "sh" at times.
For learners, it's probably best to aim for an English "s" sound as that will definitely be understood.
Why can't we say: οι γιναικες
Because οι is the wrong case (nominative instead of accusative -- like saying "he hears they" instead of "he hears them") and γιναικες is mis-spelled.
