19 Comments
It should be right, since Amir is often written that way in English. But I guess Aa is used to indicate long A in Hindi, whereas A by itself would sound more like "uh" (schwa sound).
One of the English translations offered for हर दिन is "everyday". This is wrong. "Everyday" means "mundane", "usual", "not special", etc.
Confusing the adverb "every day" and the adjective "everyday" is a common mistake among both native and non-native English speakers. It should not be perpetuated by a language learning app.
Ah thanks, I knew that one :) I thought hippietrail was referring to the various responses that one could give. There are various answers accepted as correct, but I don't think user have access to see what they all are.
11
Think of it as similar to the 'cxu..?' in Esperanto or the 'est-ce que..?' in French... They don't affect the word order of the statement afterwords, and require a yes/no/maybe answer.
Yes, similar to 'do you' or 'is it' being at the start of a question in english
In the translation of कया it may help to think of it as 'whether', which in the actual English translation needs to be left out. It helped me to understand and internalise this way of forming a question. In government forms this construction is literally used in, what I assume now are, forms translated from hindi to English (whether you live in India? Whether you are married?)
- 1370
"Whether" wouldn't make any sense here. I imagine it may have entered Indian forms in the nineteenth or early twentieth century because of translators who had read some medieval or early modern philosophy, which uses that. I tend to think of words like this (Japanese has "ka" and Polish has "czy" and Esperanto has "cxu," for instance) as just a sort of verbal question mark.
- 1472
Please leave the Aa/Ā vs. A thing out of the course, this is not a course in transliteration!
- 1370
I cannot think of an example in Hindi, which I am just beginning, but in many languages, vowel length is just as important as vowel quality. You could not do a Latin, Japanese or Hungarian course of any value, for instance, and leave out the aa vs a thing. Now, when it comes to a name like Amir, I would suggest that the developers accept the name as it is usually written in English, i.e. when an Aamir moves to the US, UK, Canada, etc, he usually writes his name Amir. When learning the word for mango, though, I would suggest that Aam still be the only acceptable answer.
- 337
Amir or Aamir is proper name and both should be accepted. There are many notable Amirs living in Indian sub continent
so the kya is just a question marker, rather than actually meaning "what", correct?
