"How much bread do you eat?"
Translation:Quanto pane mangi?
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Good eye! It isn't a question of making sure the final letters are the same, but they do indicate how they should match. For example, la donna alta and l'uomo alto make it seem like the adjective must end with the same letter as the noun. But then you find adjectives that end in -e such as speciale or verde and you have to keep in mind that they only change if the noun is plural, gli uomini sono speciali or le torte sono verdi. There are other exceptions as well, such as adjectives that don't change at all.
Here are a few examples for the quanto case:
- Quanta frutta hai? How much fruit do you have?
- Quante donne mangiano frutta? How many women eat fruit?
- Quanti uomini bevono vino? How many men drink wine?
- Quanto sale abbiamo? How much salt do we have?
As you can see, most of them follow your rule, except for the last one. Sale is masculine singular, but might be misleading because it ends in -e. Nouns that end in -e can be either gender... it does take some memorization.
I hope that's somewhat clear!
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Right. The amount of something and the something must agree. How many dresses do you have would be Quanti vestiti hai? for example
772
How did you make this conclusion? The above examples use frutta twice and yet each time quanto's ending is spelled differently based on who is eating it...
They said the amount of something and the something have to match right? In how many fruit it's quanta because of frutta. Quante because it's number of donne. Quanti - number of gli uomini That's my guess.
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Good question! I'd like to know the answer to your question as well, never heard of the "si mangia" construction before.
In terms of the second question, I think in this case the subject/verb order is different, because it's not a statement, so the question word goes before the verb and the subject gets bumped after the verb. Kind of like in German -- Wieviel Brot isst du? (really hoping there isn't a mistake in the German because lol it's been a while since I was actually practicing in a class)
Quanto mangi pane? = How much you eat bread. It's not the right translation for the exercise, although it is a workable sentence in Italian... if the noun at the end is actually a pronoun. Let's say you're doing a show with talking bread and you want to ask it about its eating habits: Quanto mangi, Pane? More realistically: Quanto mangi, Jenna? == Jenna, quanto mangi?
Reading the comments above, the last letter depends on gender of the noun.
Since 'pane' is male, you use 'quanto'.
You can usually simply use the same last letter as the noun, because that often indicates the gender of the npun. This does not work on nouns ending in e.
The gender of nouns ending in e varies. It's just something you either have to remember for each -e noun or just guess male or female (quanto or quanta) and hope! (Like i do!!)
This article explains other uses for si: http://italianencounter.com/italian-grammar/italian-si/, but if you're only level 7, it doesn't really make sense that you're encountering that. That would translate roughly as "How much bread do people/you eat? Think of it in terms of a Google search question. It would be generic, like: "How much bread do you eat before you get sick from a gluten allergy?" You aren't really asking Google directly how much it can eat before it feels sick. You is generic, as in "How much bread does one need to eat?"
Anyway, if you got that answer from an alternative correct sentence, it's probably just there for advanced users who duolingo to keep the language fresh in their minds. It's not wrong, although the meaning is a little different.
Ignoring the word order, mangi and tu are redundant. Tu is already implied by the conjugation of mangiare. It's wrong in this word order because that's the rule. Lei mangia / Tu mangi / Io mangio. Just like in English, if you say "Mangio Io", that means 'Eat I', not 'I eat'. So, Quanto pane mangi tu = How much bread do you eat you.
How do I know when to use quanto or quante. Why "Quanto pane mangi" and not Quante pane mangi?
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I don't understand. If pane ends with an e, shouldn't it be quante? Nothing in the sentence ends with an o