hi...

[thefivehole.livejournal.com]

This is maybe the dumbest question ever, but what does "Какая у вас последняя новость" mean?

Thanks/спасибо in advance.

Comments

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

What's your latest news? Or, What else is new? :)

P.S.

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

(though the sentence sounds rather artificial.)

[superslayer18.livejournal.com]

Just out of curiosity for the natives here, but I know "news" in Russian is usually plural. Does that apply when you're talking about a specific piece of news, or only when you talk about it generally? Basically, should this sentence stand as it is or should it be "Какие у вас последние новости?"

[zeqfreed.livejournal.com]

In this particular sentence the plural form would sound more natural. But generally both forms are okay.

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

>but I know "news" in Russian is usually plural

You sure you're speaking about Russian, not English? :)

Новость (singular) is quite widely used. Just one example:
Вот это новость: Леннокс Льюис побил Кличко!

(That's some news: Lennox Lewis defeated Klitschko!)

[zcrendel.livejournal.com]

"Какая у вас последняя новость" sounds bad =(

The better you should use "Что у Вас нового?" or "Какие новости?".

The first, you should use when you asking a friend about something new in his/her life (in the context 'How are you?'). In business context this question has different mean. For example, if chief asking employee it means 'What's new in your work?' or 'What can you say about progress in your project?', ...

The second, when you asking a person about something new in general (in the world, in his/her life, ...).

Hope this will be helpful.
Regards

[thefivehole.livejournal.com]

Interesting...I think my professor just wrote it that way because "последний" and "новость" were part of a list of vocab we had to learn. Thanks for your input!

[bokh.livejournal.com]

> "Какая у вас последняя новость" sounds bad =(

Depends on the context. Suppose there are several teams of software engineers debugging a news website. One team is looking at the website's front end and concludes the news aren't being updated. They know that the news are always sorted by the date so in order to understand where the damned things get stuck they call other teams, responsible for the key points along the way a news item must travel from the news feed to the front end. "Какая у вас последняя новость" is a perfectly natural question they would ask ;)

[zcrendel.livejournal.com]

You are right. But!

This situation (and context, of course) is so rare, what it looks like a joke.
In this context the word 'Новость' loses the main meaning. I mean: it's just a last item in a sequence, not the 'something new',
not the 'new information'. Of course, your example demonstrates the case where this question looks almost natural. But it sounds bad even in this case (Although, this question is allowable in this context) . As for me, 'Прочтите вашу последнюю новость?', 'Покажите вашу последнюю новость?', 'Какая новость к вам пришла последней?', ..., sound much pretty good and don't blow my ears at all :-)

Thanks for your reply. We've got a very interesting mind-storm :-)
Cheers

[spiritrc.livejournal.com]

As a programmer I must say that in the proposed context the phrase "Какая у вас последняя новость" or "Какая новость у вас последняя" sounds much more natural and is much more likely to be used than what you proposed. :) I wonder if you are a programmer too or just made a suggestion.

[zcrendel.livejournal.com]

I am a programmer too, but I really dislike such phrase: "Какая у вас последняя новость", but I will accept this variation "Какая новость у вас последняя" of original phrase. So, I think this disharmony (in first sentence) depends by wrong position of words 'последняя' and 'у Вас'. I wonder if I will be in a situation (especially in everyday life) and my question sounds like: "Какая у вас последняя новость?". It still sounds bad for me, especially as for programmer.

[zcrendel.livejournal.com]

Just a little correction :-)
> depends by wrong position of words 'последняя' and 'новость'

[pinky-the-cow.livejournal.com]

"Hmm, it's strange, my internet seems to have gone whacky, sites aren't refreshing like they should. Let's take <some news site>, for example. What's the top news item in your case? Well, for me it's something about elections, dated 1:13 PM and it's 3 o'clock now. Somwthing is definitely wrong."

In this mysteriously conjured up context, the bold part would translate into "Какая у вас последняя новость?"

"What's the latest piece of news you have. That alone determines your mood for the time being. I can't help but think that you're a rather unusual individual. And I've never seen anything like it."

And in this case, italics may be translated into the same without question mark ^^.

Contexts are everything in speech, hence the weird replies and well-deserved accusation of its being artificial when standing alone.