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- "Kucingmu dua puluh."
"Kucingmu dua puluh."
Translation:You have twenty cats.
40 Comments
'you have twenty cats', definitely not 'your cats are twenty' which doesn't make much sense in english... hopefully this gets amended soon.
but great job! i'm really enjoying this beta release - yay, finally indonesian comes to duolingo! thanks guys!
96
Well "Your cat's are twenty" does make sense. It obviously means that your cat is 20, 20 in number. But I do consider the fact that you find this hard because probably your mother tongue did not descended from the Austronesian family of languages. I find this easy because I'm Filipino, I speak Bisaya which is another language different from Filipino but much closer than Bahasan Indonesia.
I mean, it says 'cats' plural, so it isn't 'your cat's are twenty', because that's incorrect grammar. it does not refer to just one cat.
'Kucingmu' can be 'your cat' or 'your cats': theres no discretion between the two. If 'Kucingmu dua puluh' translates to 'you have 20 cats', then i would bet that 'kucingmu dua puluh tahun' would be 'your cat is 20 years old' and not 'your cats are 20 years old'
How about translating it as "Your cats are twenty in number"? If you answer to the question "How old are you?" you can answer "I'm twenty" without always saying "years old"... so it would just feel like you have to write the full sentence out in English while in Indonesian you didn't...
I understand that this structure IS used and even popular in Indonesian, so I don't have a problem in teaching it, and I can understand that the contributors didn't want to simply translate to "You have 20 cats", because that would be "Kamu punya dua puluh kucing"... but with the translation of "Your cats are twenty in number" you would have your cake and you could eat it, too! What do you guys think?
Umm it did translate to 'You have 20 cats'... I guess they've updated it?
- 158
If you wanted to say "your cat is twenty years old" you would have to add "tahun" onto the end of the sentence: kucingmu dua puluh tahun.
Yes. "You have twenty cats." — "Kamu punya dua puluh kucing." is the better structure.
the real question we should be asking is 'is it acceptable to have 20 cats?'
I translated this as "Your twenty cats". Wrong, obviously, but how would you translate it, "Kucing dua puluhmu"?
Yeah , but 8 are halfway grown kittens and 10 are blind still. New batch. Litter.
you have twenty cats is...Punyamu dua puluh kucing. Kucing dua puluh does not make any sense...
Seems to me this sentence needs a "punya" to make it be "you have 20 cats." Otherwise, it seems more like your cat is 20 (an abbreviated way of saying, "your cat is 20 years old").
Can someone enlighten me?
So I translated "kucingmu" using the Translator app and it said that it means "word" I knew it would be something along the lines of "your cat" but this had me totally stumped. Can anyone clear this up? Does kucingmu have more than 1 meaning?
No. I suspect your translator app can't handle the contractions ( kucing kamu > kucingmu ) and tried to tell you that this is just a random babble to it's circruits. It told you "Well, it's a word, but I have no clue what it means!"
lol they didn't even teach me what is "kucingmu", and i only know "kucing"
well, kucingmu is a contraction of 'kucing kamu.' and I've found throughout the course that it's pretty common.
This seems to indicate that all the cats are twenty years old, which would be quite impressive for a cat. I doubt if that's how the author intented it though.
To me, this means, "Your cats are all twenty years old," but not anything else.
Indonesian would need you to specify that age is being spoken about, that sentence does no such thing
