No, no; camilo0o0o actually asks a good question.

I mean, "Bevo l'acqua" is both "I drink water", and "I drink THE water".

"Bevo acqua" is, as far as I am concerned, ungrammatical. Why is "Vediamo uccelli" grammatical? Any italian around, please?

Same question. I seem to recall learning that unlike English, Italian always uses a definite or indefinite article with a noun. But it seems like Italian is more like English than I was told, because I keep coming across examples when the article is omitted and the meaning is different because of that omission. Fine - when the exception swallows the rule, you just accept it and move on.

Well, that'd be "we see the birds," and I guess Duolingo decided to leave out the "the" part of the sentence

I'm no expert, but I think these elisions probably just happen when thousands of people speak quickly in a language over hundreds of years. It's not something intentional, it just naturally evolves so that things slip off the tongue more easily. It's probably similar to how contractions arose in English - after awhile, people saying "cannot" (two syllables) over and over found themselves saying "can't" (one syllable).

I know that French employs liasons (sounds from the first word crossing into the following word). I would Imagine that liasons exist in one form or another in all of the Romance languages. But I would like to have this thought verified or dismissed by a linguist.

Two thoughts on this topic, keeping in mind that the original comment was 4 years ago, and the audio has probably improved since then:

1. When new to a language, a lot of people just don't hear things because those things are unexpected. The more familiar one becomes with a language, the more the ear can pick up.

2. The more familiar one becomes with a language, the more one can anticipate what comes next, and even fill in things that are indeed missing. An example would be that you hear i uccelli, but realize that gli is required, so you mind fills it in, even if the "li" sound gets elided to i somehow.

vedere: to see

guadare: to watch or to look at.

You can see something in an instant and then look away. That's not "watching". "Lookin at" means casting one's glance in the direction of, but not necessarily seeing. "I looked at the crowd of women, but I did not see my wife."

I also question why "We look at birds" is incorrect.

I think that "to look at" is a better translation for the verb "guardare", that implies that you're paying attention to the birds, but "vedere" indicates quite a casual action, that is "the birds were passing by and we saw them".

Looking at means you are doing something for a period of time. See something applys to a spacific moment. Correct me if I'm wrong.

"Le anatre" = "the ducks". Anatra is feminine and has to have the feminine plural ending (swap the a to an e) and the feminine plural "the" which is "le". I might be over-simplifying, but that's the general idea.

Note that, with plurals, you never turn them into contractions. Before a vowel, la and lo become l', but the plural article is always either le, i or gli.

Second note: It's lo which becomes l', not il. You can reach that conclusion only indirectly. Words that begin with z, gn, and s + [consonant] take lo/gli, so it follows that a word which takes gli in the plural (masculine nouns beginning with a vowel) also take lo in the singular. Thus, l' is short for lo/la, and il is never made into a contraction because it never appears before a word beginning with a vowel.

I lived in Kansas for 30+ years. The closest I've come to a tornado was when we moved to North Carolina, and an F 0.5 hit about 3 miles from our house. No basements or storm shelters here, either.