"Birkaç iyi adam"
Translation:A few good men
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Hahaha. Oh my, that made me laugh so much. I'm really glad the 90's are over.
I am having a bit of trouble in this section knowing when to use singular or plural forms. For this example specifically, would you not use "adamlar"?
There may be exceptions to this (and if so, I'm hoping one of the Turkish speakers will be along to correct me), but I think generally you don't use the plural ending if there's a quantity associated with the noun. That is, if you're talking about 2 or 10 or "a few" or "many" somethings, then you won't use the plural ending. (I assume the reasoning is that the quantity already tipped everybody off that the somethings are plural, making the ending redundant.....?)
Thanks! You're right. I learned this years ago but have mixed it up in my head with other language rules.
Ah, and thanks for posting the link: I hadn't realized that bazı was an exception.
Yep, Selcen. Quantifiers--in any language--tend to give me trouble. Even in Spanish. This is one of those modules where a good page of grammar would help a lot.
One of my own problems is distinguishing "biraz" from "birkaç" from "birçok". I've been transliterating "biraz" as "a few", "birçok" as "a good many" (or maybe, "a heap"--heck, I live in the American South). But "birkaç"? Any overlap with the other two? Seriously, Google Translate has it both as "a few" and as "several". Those two are not synonymous in my mind. "Several" hovers somewhere between "a few" and "a good many". Does Turkish make similar distinctions--that I can understand!?
biraz is not a few, it is "some" and birkaç is a few. Explanations given by deorme90 in the link below are very helpful.
Google translate? It is very very bad for Turkish, never use it especially when you are trying to understand differences. It may only be used to have an idea about a long text etc.
You're right about Google Translate. Fortunately I downloaded the books that were recommended to me, in particular The Delights of learning Turkish. What do I use Google Translate for? Largely, grins and giggles. When I'm attempting to plow through Turkish, it's nice to stop every once in a while and feed it a word or a phrase. It boosts my ego.
Just this week, some phrase that meant "Children usually drink milk" was translated by GT as "All day the children drink." There's gotta be job security for me somewhere as long as GT is so hopeless with Turkish.
I get confused with these, too, but I found this thread helpful, so I'll pass it along: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/7894594
j.45, have a look at that site on the topic of words' order in Turkish, in English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_grammar#Word_order
