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- "Vouă vă dăm fructe."
16 Comments
To you, to you, (we) give fruits.
vouă = vă are long and short form of dative plural you. - accusative would be: voi = vă
Just a small comment for those who are learning Spanish as well. This type of construction exists in Spanish, too (and it's quite common): Os damos fruta a vosotros. Being "os" the weak form of "a vosotros".
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I find that having the "personal a" breaking up the pronouns in Spanish makes it much easier to understand, just like using "pe" with accusative pronouns in Romanian. Without something like that the dative pronouns in Romanian are quite tricky!
You're right! In Spanish would be:
Vouă vă dăm fructe = A ustedes les damos frutas. . (Nosotros) a ustedes (vouă) les (vă) damos (dăm) frutas (fructe).
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Why "Voua va" rather than just "va"? Emphasis? It's too easy to mistake "va" for something else in normal conversation?
From what I've read in other comments, it's for emphasis, but also maybe a more formal way of speaking than how native speakers would say it. One native speaker said "you could say it that way, but it would sound very robotic".
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Short answer? Because in Romanian fructe is countable and we're learning Romanian.
It should accept both fruit and fruits, and if it doesn't you should report it, but the default translation should always be fruits because that's what it actually says in Romanian.
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Why?
The goal in this tree is to learn to speak Romanian naturally, not natural English. Natural Romanian is "fruits." If I start translating words like "fructe" as singular I'm likely to forget it's plural in Romanian.
"We give you fruits" is not the most natural way to say it, but it is not worse English then "we give you fruit." Fruits is not commonly used, but it appears in well-known phrases ("fruits of their labor"), a google reveals people using it to talk about multiple kinds of fruit, etc.
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The wording of English sentences has nothing to do with how natural the Romanian is. The Romanian AND English sentences should sound natural, otherwise they're just propagating bad language.
And let's not forget that sometimes people take Duolingo course in languages other than their native one. For them, poor English sentences are misleading.
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I don't understand why you're insisting "we give you fruits" is bad language. Fruits is a perfectly valid form of the word in English. It's less common then fruit, but uncommon != bad. There's actually a good wiktionary write-up of the issue: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fruit#Usage_notes
Teaching most of your Romanian language students bad Romanian because some of them would learn an uncommon word in English ("fruits" as a noun) does not make sense to me.
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@nickbii fruit is overwhelmingly used as an uncountable noun, especially in the context that this lesson is implying. Your link supports this as well.
I'm not saying that the sentence with "fruits" shouldn't be accepted as a correct answer but the default answer given should align with standard usage unless there is a compelling reason not to. Certainly, valuing literalness in a default translation over naturalness is not a compelling reason.
It appears to me that "fructe" means both "fruit" and "fruits"; then there is the word "fructa: (with the "a" having the accent breve diacritic mark); how is it pluralized, I wonder. [By the way, I also note that the acute accent (') is used in some words to indicate a stressed vowel.]
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According to Romanian Wiktionary, fructă is an alternative form of fruct. If you need a form that is not nominative/accusative singular you wouldn't decline fructă, you'd use a form of fructe.
