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- "His sisters read a book."
"His sisters read a book."
Translation:उसकी बहनें किताब पढ़ती हैं।
17 Comments
623
Why is this correct? I thought translating उसकी बहनें किताब पढ़ती हैं would give "His sisters read book", which doesn't make sense. I thought the correct way of saying it would be उसकी बहनें एक किताब पढ़ती हैं. So far, in all other cases before this Duolingo always specified if the object was singular by putting एक before the object.
उसकी बहनें किताब पढ़ती हैं would translate to either 'His sisters read a book' or 'His sisters read the book'.
Hindi does not have a definite article and the word for 'one', एक serves as the indefinite article. However, in practice, you can drop the एक in many cases and the definiteness is inferred from context.
So, 'His sisters read a book' can be translated as both 'उसकी बहनें एक किताब पढ़ती हैं' and 'उसकी बहनें किताब पढ़ती हैं।'.
Also, the plural of किताब is किताबें so there is no confusion that we are talking about a single book.
उसकी is used when it is followed by a feminine noun (either singular or plural) like बहनें. उसके is used when followed by a plural masculine noun and उसका for a singular masculine noun.
पढ़ती is used for a feminine subject ('sisters' in this case). पढ़ता is used for a masculine singular subject and पढ़ते for a masculine(or mixed gender) plural subject.
- 133
No. Like @vinay92 said, पढ़ते is for masculine or mixed gender plurals. Feminine plurals remain the same as feminine singulars in verbs, except for the fact that है changes to हैं.
On your phone, you can download the Hindi keyboard from your phone settings.
On your computer, you can use the phonetic Hindi input option or the Devanagari (INSCRIPT) keyboard on Google input tools. If you're on Chrome, you can add the Google input tools extension that will allow you to easily switch between keyboards. If you use the INSCRIPT keyboard, it will also show you the keyboard layout on your screen for easy typing.
I feel the answeris too easy to choose from the given options because in this question the word ' read ' is present so the answer will have ' padta ' or ' padte '. So from the options given in this question all a person ,who has just started studying hindi, need to do is look for those words which is too easy because the other two options have ' banana ' and ' drinking ' which is obviously not the answer. So instead of me studying the grammer and syntax of sentence construction , all i need to do is look for that word and click it which is not the right way to study All i am saying is construct tricky options so i can think instead of just straight away clocking the answer.
And yet I got it wrong on my first try. The word order is difficult to get used to for some of us. Also, when there is more than one form of the same word, I get those wrong fairly often still as well.
- 133
उनकी is either used for respect or for plurals. But it would be used for respect only if the person you're talking to is specifically given as older than you, otherwise it might be misinterpreted as if you're saying that there are many subjects (many people with sisters), however there's only one.
उसकी बहनें एक किताब पढ़ती हैं| There should be एक for the translation of 'a'.
