"लड़के चाय नहीं पीते।"
Translation:The boys do not drink tea.
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In negative sentences such as this, you can drop the हैं.
Most people in spoken Hindi don't do so. I suggest you not to drop it.
"Most people in spoken Hindi don't do so." And yet it's dropped in most of the Duolingo examples. Hmm...
when spoken colloquially, people often drop the 'hain' from the end of the sentence... it's just quicker and less formal (and usually understood)
yeah, you CAN include 'hain' at the end though Duolingo does not keep 'hain' for negative sentences. hope it helps
lol yeah Duolingo should not promote this "that only boys drink coffee and girl drink tea"
How does one tell the difference between 'boys don't drink tea' and 'the boys don't drink tea' in Hindi? For the record both English statements are accepted as correct answers by Doulingo.
Both statements should be accepted because both are correct. There's no explicit "the" in Hindi, it's assumed. For example, लड़के नाच रहे थे (ladke naach rahe the). The translation would be "THE boys were dancing" and the literal translation would be "boys were dancing". लड़कियां गा रही थी (ladkiyan gaa rahi thi) would be "THE girls were singing".
Hello, I do not think you understood exactly what I intended to ask.
Observe the following to note the distinction:
-
Boys do not drink tea.
This states a rule, or a generally accepted truth. In this case, it could be that all boys in a hypothetical location do not drink tea. -
The boys do not drink tea.
This states the preference of a specific set of boys. So, those boys in question do not drink tea but other boys drink tea.
My question, therefore, is as there is no explicit the in Hindi, how does one tell the difference between (1) a generally accepted truth and (2) the situation/case for a subset.
NB: I know and have confirmed that both of the English statements are accepted by Duolingo.
Hi Alex, The answer, indeed, is that one doesn't necessarily know from grammar; one hopes to know the meaning from context.
If someone just says this sentence without prior reference to a set of boys, then we'd tend to interpret it as "boys don't..." If a discussion of specific people had already occurred, then we might think "the boys don't..."
The thing I wanted to add is that one can say "voh laRke", literally "those boys", as an effective way of specifying "THE boys". In other words, this is a grammatical way of distinguishing "boys" vs. "the boys" that one CAN use, though it won't always be used.
As it was explained above, there's no explicit "the" in Hindi (as in many other languages with no sets of definite articles). Which means the distinction between definiteness and indefiniteness is somehow less relevant in Hindi, it is disambiguated from the context.
just realized that I write boy instead of boys, review before post your answer!✌️
It's a matter of subject-verb agreement. In English, you would say "The boy does not drink tea" for a single boy. Once you have multiple boys, it becomes "The boys do not drink tea".
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I was so distracted by the lack of "हैं" that I translated "चाय" as "chai" instead of tea. Marked wrong! (Yeah, I reported it. If this course isn't going to use "chai" interchangeably with "tea", I may have to bow out.)
But thanks, all, for explaining where the "hain" went.
I guess the chai for us Europeans (tea with lots of specific spices, milk and sugar) is not the only way tea is prepared in India (please correct me if I'm wrong!) so then we need to translate it as "tea".
चाय is tea, however one prepares it. (Tea is from China, Chinese word for tea is "chá". Arabic word for tea is "shay," etc.) In the 1990s (according to my memory), people in the West started marketing Indian style of "masaala chai" (spice tea, which Indian people would just call tea if there was no need to disambiguate it) as "chai" to mark its difference / specialness compared to what they were most familiar with. I guess rather than just say it was "Indian style tea", they thought it would be more cool and interesting to call it "chai," haha. Then major marketers like Starbucks, etc. really messed it up by calling it "chai tea"! I remember working in a cafe in the US in the 90s and we used a product made by a company called "Chai," which was like a sugar syrup with spices that we had to blend with milk-tea to create the "chai" we sold. It was terrible, but the sort of hippie/hipster people who ordered it -- who at that time must have thought they were kind of special since it wasn't as widely "known" yet -- thought it was some special thing that would lead them to enlightenment, hehe! (Cue exotic sitar music in the background) Yeah, then Starbucks got a hold of it. It was Pumpkin Spice Latte before Pumpkin Spice Latte! I've never ordered it from a Starbucks, but I fear they probably use that nasty syrup when they make it, because Starbucks doesn't prepare tea... The main real difference of India tea preparation compared to most tea in the world (and not always, but most often) is that Indians BOIL everything together, spices or no spices. I personally hate that, since I'm a fan of "good" tea, and good tea gets destroyed when you boil it; you're supposed to pour water OVER tea leaves. So, Indian tea preparation is less like making tea as it was introduced from China and more like using tea leaves as a flavoring of hot milk -- which was the traditional beverage before the British introduced tea to India. And since the flavor has to compete with milk and sugar, it's not delicate at all, so you boil the heck out of it to extract the strongest flavor!
Thank you for this. I'm going to be giggling about "exotic sitar music" for the rest of the weekend. XD
How can we understand whether it is present past or future.... Can anyone help me.. please
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Luckily, this is a masculine word, and native to Hindi, so telling singular and plural apart is pretty easy. One boy, "ek ladka" (एक लड़का). Two boys, "do ladke" (दो लड़के). Does that help?
Isn't this correct? Ladke chai nahin peetha (instead of peethey) if it is correct. Then what's the difference between both
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Great question! Just remember the verb has to agree with the subject. It's the boys (लड़के) that are doing the drinking, not the tea (चाय). So since the subject is masculine and plural, the verb stem needs a masculine plural ending. So it has to be peete (पीते), not peeta (पीता). Unless you're trying to say, "The tea does not drink the boys," in which case--just like English-- you gotta change the word order a bit. :)
Still i didn't get it bro. I mean I've seen sentences"Voh ladka chai nahin peeta" "raj chai nahin peeta" here also the boy only does the action but then how it's peetha and not peethey? Is it because it's plural? Also when I've translated the sentence which i asked at first, gives the same translation even though the words differ at the last
- 1540
Oh, got it! The missing piece here is that this sentence has "boys", not "the boy". Ladke (लड़के), not ladka (लड़का), right? If it were singular ladka, you'd be absolutely right.
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Thr description of boys shows " the boy" singular as a correct answer. But I was marked incorrect.
