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I was watching a video about the most frequent mistakes Brazilians make speaking English and the first mistake was saying "Do you want to try?" instead of "Do you want to try it?".

I'm a native speaker of American English, and I feel that if you're eating food or doing an activity and you say to someone standing there "Do you want to try?" that it's correct. However, I'm not very strong grammatically, so I'm curious if there's something technically wrong with that.

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    If someone is, say, flying a kite and they turn to you and offer you the string, "Do you want to try?" is an appropriate query (though there's nothing wrong with "... try it" either). If someone is grilling some whatever on a charcoal grill, however, "Do you want to try it?" is a hair more idiomatic, to my Midwest US ears. In the first case "try" implies some action on the part of the "tryer", while in the second case "try it" implies tasting or sampling something. But neither is technically wrong in either scenario.
    – Hot Licks
    Commented Apr 19, 2016 at 3:03
  • depends on the context
    – Nick
    Commented Apr 19, 2016 at 3:23
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    Keep in mind that Portuguese not only drops subjects when these are obvious (like most Romance languages but for French) it also drops objects, which is much more unusual. However, even in Spanish you often enough hear a plain ¿quieres probar? for that inquiry.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Apr 19, 2016 at 3:57

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A transitive verb can have an implied direct object, if the direct object is obvious given context.

Signs make use of this situation frequently. "Do not pass (other vehicles)." etc.

Likewise, the subject of a sentence can also be implied as well.

"Want to try?" is easily understood when spoken directly to another person when you're currently interacting with something they can try (activity, food, etc).

Going off of tchrist's comment, I'd say that English also does the same thing. I'm trying to imagine a situation where it wouldn't apply, but as long as context allows, it would seem acceptable for the object to be implied.

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