34 Comments
It can be both, they have slightly different nuances.
"Il caffè è tuo" maybe it was mine, or maybe you have so much coffee and this is one of your many coffees...
"Il caffè è il tuo" that's the only coffee that is yours, and probably I am not stating it in the most gently way ever.
Think about it like this: Il caffè è tuo = the coffee is yours Il caffè è il tuo = the coffee is yours, but it is THE ONLY coffee that's yours, and it's not as polite.
In English, the equivalent would be something like: "the coffee is yours", versus; "that is your coffee".
In the first case, we're not sure how many coffees the person has. In the second, we're still not 100% sure, but we can more accurately assume that it's their only one. Also, it doesn't sound as nice.
I hope this helps.
2014
Actually, that's not the distinction.
"Il caffè è il tuo" means "The COFFEE (and not something else) is yours."
"Il caffè è tuo" means "The coffee is YOURS (and not someone else's)."
"tue" is used for nouns in feminine plural form. Like..uh.."Le tue farfalle" =("Your butterflies"). In our case caffè is a masculine singular noun, so you use "il tuo" or "tuo"
Is there a chart anywhere that shows the different forms of "your"? I'm still relatively new to navigating this site :)
So did I. I said "It is your coffee" Which is exactly equivalent. I cannot understand why it should be marked wrong. It is just what we might say in english.
But you are using "it" as the subject of the phrase, changing the grammar. There is a difference between using "the coffee" as the subject and replacing the coffee with "it" as the subject, which is part of what we are supposed to learn by this example IMHO.
My answer of "it is your coffee" is wrong. Perche? In English the answers are equivalent.
Because in this case, coffee was the subject of the sentence, so it needs to stay that way in translation.
The "tuo", (yours), is at the end of the sentence not the beginning which changes it to yours from your. If you wanted to say "It is your coffee" you would need to put the "tuo" at the front of the sentence and the subject, (caffe), at the end just as you would using the words "yours" and "your" in English.
I always find the audio for most of these Italian recordings so quiet at the end, which is why 50% of the time I get the translation wrong.
If the correct answer is based on a nuance, then they should teach that. Just throwing these types of nuanced sentences into the lessons without some explanation is not good instruction. Few will be able to distinguish the difference without some more definite guidance. These unexplained exercises confuse the students and create a lack of confidence. You can often google grammar to gain a deeper understanding of something you are struggling with but I can’t find anything about these type of differences
- 2014
Because the grammar structure is very different.
The coffee is yours = Il caffè è tuo:
- "the coffee" is the noun phrase in the subject, made of a definite article and a noun
- "yours" is the possessive pronoun in the predicate
It is your coffee = È il tuo caffè:
- "it" is the pronoun in the subject
- "your coffee" is in the predicate, made of a possessive adjective and a noun
- 2014
There are several factors at play. First and foremost, speech recognition software is far from perfect. Then there's your microphone, your RAM, your internet connection, and the server load.
- 1110
Sometimes when I run into speech recognition problems, I reset my microphone in the system sets - getting the system to use the microphone and to retrain it to set volume levels, that is.
Hi how do you say 'coffee' in Italian and cafe, In Italian, according to google translate they both come out the same, why can't you all speak English, ?xx
