"There is one dog at his house."
Translation:彼の家には一匹の犬がいます。
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I answered 彼の家に犬が一匹います and it was accepted. So it seems that かれのいえに犬が一ぴきいます should also be accepted as it's the same in hiragana as far as I can tell.
Why does the counter a modifier for dog in this instead of coming after the dog like in othere examples
1706
Probably just because both are correct. I don't know if there is any difference in the actual meaning though.
- 354
The meaning is the same, but the way of phrasing is a bit different.
At his house, dogs: there is one. At his house, there is one dog
"犬が一匹ある": you give slightly more emphasis on dogs/dog. "一匹の犬がある": you give slightly more emphasis on "one dog".
It's topic marking. いえに is "house (location marker)", adding the は makes it the topic of the sentence. A clunkier but closer to literal translation is "As for his house, there is one dog."
- 1130
"一匹の犬はかれのいえにいます." Can anyone explain to me why this version isn't correct? To me, I would consider the dog to be the topic of the sentence, not his house.
With は it means "The one dog is in his house". Making something the topic implies that it is established. You can't introduce something previously unknown ("a dog") using は. "The" and は are not the same thing but they are related.
Addendum: は can also be used idiomatically to mean "at least". With that in mind I suppose your sentence could be taken to mean "There's one dog at his house, at least". Not sure how natural it sounds though. は is often translated "as for..."; the sentence would end up meaning something like "As for one dog, there's that at his house [as opposed to five dogs]".
- 1706
You can put wa after many of the other particles, to mark the word as the topic as well. So "ni wa" marks the previous word as both the location and the topic.
- 1855
Why do we use "かれ" (which we learned meant "he") instead of "これ"? Is this a mistake in the sentence?
I'm struggling as well. I feel like this lesson level is throwing a whole bunch of new grammer at us with no explaination. I'm constantly stumped at figuring out why the word order is the way it is, more so than any previous lesson.
It's because Japanese doesn't have articles (a, an, the). If you said 犬がいます it would be ambiguous. It could mean "There is a dog" or "There are dogs". If you want to specify it's one you have to say 一匹 but then the English translation sounds a bit weird when you do it as "one dog" to make the point that we're learning about counters/classifiers. It's a pedagogical translation, not a literary one.
Did you learn all this on this web site? Or are you also studing some where else? They do not explain anything here. I see your name a lor.....jk
Yeah, a little, on its own. If followed by something like "...but no more than that" it makes more sense.
