"How many gifts do the newlyweds receive?"
Translation:Quanti regali ricevono gli sposi?
62 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
205
It's just the structure of the grammar in Italian. It helps to translate confusing sentences in English and find out how to structure a sentence.
How many (quanti) gifts (regali) do they receive (ricevono) the newlyweds (gli sposi).
How many gifts do they receive? Who? The newlyweds!
1123
I disagree. Both sentences are correct, I feel the little difference in "externalities": the 'correct' versions asks how many presents were given to these people (and not to another person celibrating his birthday), the 'incorrect' one asks how many gifts did they actually receive (e.g. except the one we forgot to bring and will send later).
When you look at the English sentence, you start to realise that we construct our questions in the same way, with the verb (do...receive/ricevono) going before the subject (the newlyweds/ gli sposi).
So we can try to look at it this way as well:
Quanti (How many) regali (gifts) ricevono (do...receive) gli sposi (the newlyweds)?
1415
The issue is they're talking about the gifts being received, not the newlyweds receiving them. The gifts are the subject, not the newlyweds.
This is just my observation, I don't know if there is any formal rule or even a convention involved here. English is just fine with having the verb be the final word in the sentence; Italian (at least as taught by DL) prefers the verb to come along a bit more quickly. Since this sentence is interrogative, the question "how many" comes first in both languages. Then Italian wants the verb, English is okay with delaying the verb.
Again, I'm not saying this is any sort of rule, but keeping this construct in mind has helped me as I navigate these DL modules.
1206
The translation for 'newlyweds' is given as 'sposini' in the hover hints, but the translation above gives 'sposi.' Which is it?
They bait you in with the "giovani" part to make you believe that "newlyweds" could be translated to "young spouses". Cause "sposi" could just mean "spouses". Is there such a concept of recently married versus been married in italy? If there is, then maybe the question should use that. That way we can learn to be more italian in thinking and not just translating english to english words in italian.
400
Gotta love "how many gifts receive the newlyweds?" Depends how many newlyweds there are