"Jsou ty stroje nové?"
Translation:Are the machines new?
29 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
I got busted for "Are those new machines?" but the translation given was "Are those machines new?" -- not "Are THE machines new?" as is shown above. The reason given for why my answer was wrong was "You used the wrong word," and the underlined ("wrong") word was... "new." So I'm really not understanding why my translation was unacceptable.
609
I made the same mistake. The problem here is that "nové" comes after "stroje": "Jsou ty stroje nové?" means "Are those machines new?", while "Jsou ty nové stroje?" means "Are those new machines?"
SO... Just trying to figure out if a rule can be extracted here. Are ALL masculine inanimate plural subjects with an "e" (instead of "i") or is this just an outlier? And is there a way to tell a masculine "animate" vs. "inanimate". I'm a romance language guy (and English obviously) so this is a new concept for me linguistically.
You may want to add this site to your resource kit... lots of very useful information, but it can be somewhat overwhelming at first glance! Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_declension#Nouns.
No, many masculine inanimate nouns follow the hrad paradigm with the nominative plural hrady.
There is no way. Often you can guess based on the nature of the word. People and animals tend t be animate. Plants and non-living objects are often inanimate. The dictionary will have a definite answer. But some words can have an alternatve form of the other sub-gender (often bookish or poetic). That is an advanced topic though (dny/dni, hroby/hrobové,...).
901
My variant "Are these machines new" Wasn't accepted. Why I cannot translate Ty as these here?