"Beviamo acqua."
Translation:We drink water.
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1181
but duo accepts both the water and water for l'acqua. Also, the water sounds weird to me.
It does sound strange in English, because English doesn't prefix general/abstract concepts with "the". But even in English you can say "I drink the water", e.g. as a reply to a question like: "There is a glass of water on the table. What do you do?", because now "the" refers to that particular water.
Ive been taught that "I drink the water" is equivalent to that I, as a person, drink water. Same as I would say "Mangio il formaggio" if I came over to your house, and you wondered if I could have cheese. Ommiting the definite article gives a different emphasize. If I meet you at a bar, and you already had ordered a beverage, I could ask you "Cosa bevi?" And you would answer me: "Bevo aqua".
702
In Italian is not necessary to write the subject pronouns because the verb has a particular form with each one (that fact does not happen in English). For example the verb ''parlare'' (to speak). Its conjugation in the present simple tense is as follows: Io parlo (I speak), Tu parli (you speak), Lui / Lei parla (he / she speaks), Noi parliamo (we speak), Voi parlate (you all speak), Loro parlano (they speak). As you can see if I write ''Parlo con la mia mamma'' (I speak with my mom), it involves the Italian subject pronoun ''io'' but I can omit it because the form ''parlo'' is just for that person. I am a native Spanish speaker and my language follows the same rule.
789
Very helpful answer. However I didn't think you'd use la in your example of "la mia mamma" - can any native speakers confirm? Have seen in other exercises that family members don't need the article. Thx
Yeah, except in French they also have different conjugated forms of the verb for different persons, so the information about the person is also contained in the verb form, and yet they still require those personal pronouns :q (and all of that despite being lazy in other areas of the language, e.g. dropping so much in speech at the end of words unless they are forced to pronounce it). So this really explains nothing about why some languages allow to drop personal pronouns while others don't.
"We all" and "We" are not the same.
For example, you and your buddy are in a group of ten people. Only you and your buddy are drinking water; everyone else is drinking beer. The waiter comes to your table and says, "More beer?" You would reply, "We're drinking water," (indicating you and your buddy). You would not say, "We are all drinking water," because the other eight people are not drinking water.
But this is a shortcoming of the English language in which there's no clear distinction between singular "you" and plural "you". Well, unless you're a Southerner, then you just say "y'all" for the plural, problem solved ;) But yeah, DuoLingo better accept the "you all" for those who want to emphasize that they meant the plural form, it's better for learning. (And we're not here to learn English, are we? We're here to learn Italian :q )
I answered "We buy water" and it wasn't correct, although it says drink / buy in the description of the meaning when you tap on the word.
Well, there is, if you're Polish, because in Polish, verbs in first person plural have an ending "-my" which is similar to the Italian "-mo". And this should work quite similar way in other Romance languages (based on Latin) – they often have that "m" sound in first person forms. But for English, I don't have any idea. Hmm… Perhaps you could connect that "m" sound with "Me and My friend" or something?
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I typed "We drink water" but it repatedly tells me I got it wrong, it should be "We drink water". ???????
1245
There seems to be a problem with the audios, the last part of the sentence is not always clear
Do you mean drinking as an adjective (ie "water for drinking"?) - if so, I think it might be "l'acqua da bere" or something like that. If you mean the gerund (eg "we are drinking water"), this can be the same phrase in Italian "Beviamo l'acqua". However, for an action CURRENTLY IN PROGRESS, the Italians would use the present continuous: "Stiamo bevendo l'acqua" = "we are drinking water" (at this moment).