"He is not writing a book."
Translation:Han skriver ikke en bok.
21 Comments
isn't that "he's writing not a book?". What if I wanted to say "he's writing not a book, but a letter"? how do I know where to put the 'ikke' for the sentence to make sense?
Thanks. So there's no distinction between 'he's {not writing} a book' and 'he's writing, but not a book', so to speak. Both meanings are Han skriver ikke en bok. What about just 'he's not writing'? Han ikke skriver?
No distinction in "Han skriver ikke en bok" and "Han skriver ikke en bok, men et brev".
"He's not writing" = "Han skriver ikke": The verb should be at the second position.
they said my translation was wrong, that i should have said "Han skriver inga bok." but i've never learned the word inga before, and it didn't show in the suggestions
When modifying feminine nouns, you have two options: "ingen" and "inga".
We only teach the former in the course, which is the more common of the two, but since both are accepted either can be shown to you when you enter an incorrect answer.
You mark 'ei bok' as a typo, while in the adjectives tips 'book' is the example word for declining 'little' for female nouns. Is it usually a masculine noun, is this a bug?
They're both accepted, and common.
I'm not sure why you're getting a typo message, but I saw you got the same for another sentence (where 'ei bok' was also accepted on our end), so apparently it's not working as it should.
Well, if it's all right with 'ei', then I will ignore the warning :) Thanks for clarifying!
Yes, it's definitely all right! :)
Hopefully we'll be able to figure out what's causing it.
It says the correct translation is "Han skriver ikke inga bok": I haven't seen inga in any of my lessons and it's not listed as a possible translation for "a." Can you explain to me why it is inga, not en? Takk!
What you saw was probably "Han skriver inga bok.".
"Inga" is the feminine form of "ingen", and they're both contractions of "ikke en" and "ikke noen".
"Han skriver ikke en bok." is still the preferred translation.
288
"et" is neuter, "en" is masculine, "ei" is female. This is the grammatical gender and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the gender of a person. For example, it's correct to say "en jente" (but "ei jente" works as well), even though "jente" is female.
This concept of grammatical gender might be a bit harder to grasp for native english speakers, as in english you only have one article: The. It's just something you have to try and memorize. But don't worry, natives will understand you even though you may use the wrong gender every now and then.
- 288
Actually, "bok" is a feminine noun, but in bokmål every feminine noun can be written as a masculine noun.
As to WHY "bok" is feminine/masculine and not neuter: I don't think even linguists know the reason for grammatical genders (or if they do, I haven't read about it). They don't follow any real logic, and you just have to memorize it.
In german, for example, "Buch" is a neuter noun, in french it's masculine (le livre). As I've said: There's no logic to it.
- 288
See my previous answer to CoDLiTe: Bok actually is a feminine noun, but can be used as a masculine noun in bokmaal.
