"He eats garlic."
Translation:Lui mangia l'aglio.
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i filled in "mangia l'aglio", which was accepted, however the answer "Lui mangia dell'aglio" is given by duolingo and would be translated i believe into he eats from the garlic. which one is most used?
It depends on the context...
"Lui mangia aglio" he usually eats garlic
"Lui mangia dell'aglio" probably he is eating garling right now
"Lui mangia l'aglio" to say that he usually eats garlic OR that he is eating that specific garlic right now.
It means just that. Like in french (e.g. "Je bois de l'eau"), it's called a genitive partitive.
The meaning is "he eats [some] of the [total] garlic".
Thanks, that cleared up a lot. I had thought that Italians usually just used the article indiscriminately.
Articles are more used in italian than in english.
Gli articoli sono più usati in italiano che in inglese
:)))
Very interesting. The simple present in English seems to have taken on the sense of "usually," e.g., "he goes to school" as opposed to "he is going to school" (right now).
Yeah, based on the other examples, I'd read this one really as "he eats some garlic" instead of "eats garlic". Especially since there's a l'aglio creeping in here, wouldn't that imply "the garlic" if not some garlic?
Given the setence "he eats garlic" than isn't the dell' wrong since they did not ask to translate "he eats some garlic". So it would be incorrect to start adding words to it?
No, in English "He eats some garlic." is talking about an unspecified amount of garlic (Old English "He eats of the garlic.") and we often just say "He eats garlic." in the same situation, as again the amount is unspecified; even though, "He eats garlic." could also be a generalization meaning "Garlic is something that he eats." So, from the Italian to English translation both "He eats some garlic." and "He eats garlic." should be accepted. So, when translating from the English "He eats garlic.", you again have more than one Italian translation to use.
I'm a little confused. I'm looking at this table: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Italian/Prepositions and can't seem to figure out why it's dell'aglio. The contracted form is used instead of the more cumbersome "della aglio", right? But how is this possible, as aglio is masculine, meaning that it requires the "il" article. Thanks for any replies!