"वह पढ़ता है।"
Translation:He reads.
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She reads is incorrect as 'aa' matra is used for men and 'ee' matra is used for women.
The vowel symbol that is attached to a consonant. For example, ा in ता is the matra of the vowel आ.
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While your hindi translation is correct, the tense is not imperfect (which is equivalent to simple past), but present continuous (or present progressive).
- 2799
I notice there is no vowel sound between the R and T sounds in the reading verb (partaa instead of /parataa/?). Is there some sign to indicate that there is no "a" vowel after the consonant? Does Hindi not jam them together the way Sanskrit does (I had a friend who studied Sanskrit; I have no direct knowledge of it)?
I can't find the official rule written somewhere, but based on my 2 years of study, in almost all Hindi words over two syllables, you don't pronounce the implied short "a" vowel sound between two consonants, if the first one ends with a consonant and the second one starts with a consonant (ie. आदमी but not औरत or किताब, because the first syllable of औरत ends with a long vowel sound, and the second syllable of किताब begins with one). So for example, जन्मदिन (birthday) has two consonant sounds next to each other: janamdin. The name of Hindi script, देवनागरी (pronounced devnagree) similarly omits the "a" sound between the "v" and "n." The other pattern I've noticed is that with two syllable words, they must end in a long vowel for this to apply. For example, "palace" (महल) pronounces both of the short vowels (mehel - also they're pronounced as "eh" not "a" because h/ह changes the way vowels are pronounced, that's a whole nother thing that I can explain if you want), but to the best of my knowledge if you added a long vowel sound at the end - महला - it would just be mehla not mehela. In terms of whether there's a way to indicate this, unfortunately no - I somehow just caught on after hearing enough words. Hope this helps! Let me know if I can explain anything better!
- 2799
Oh, wow, so they drop that implied vowel a lot more than I expected. Having proceeded a bit farther in the course, I see that they do still use the combined devanagari (or devnagree) letters as in Sanskrit, but I guess they aren't absolutely necessary to create consonant clusters. Thank you for the help.
Look up Scwa Deletion. Its something programmers are still investigating, hence why Duolingo incorrectly pronounces some words with extra syllables.
It is what is known as an auxiliary verb, you can read up on it if you go to the basics 1 skill and instead of pressing practice, click the lightbulb in the top right corner.
The way बह is pronounced is more like बहा which means 'there'. So this is creating confusion.
Just saying "he reads" does not convey that the subject is a यह, not a वह, so "that boy/man reads" should be an acceptable translation.
