"Zum Glück konnten wir ihn machen."

[Libpor]

Luckily we could do him - was accepted, and I lol'd.

[kyky]

oh dear...

[Sk8rMom]

"Zum Glück konnten wir ihn machen?" What about "Zum Glück konnten wir es machen?" It sounds better, in my opinion.

[martaccia]

the gender in german is grammatical. i am afraid that duolingo does not stress this enough, especially since most of the users are english native speakers. "es" does not refer necessarily to inanimates objects, and on the other hand "it" can't always be translated as "es".
in this sentence we don't know what that pronoun is referring to, but it must be something (grammatically) masculine.

[phle]

thanks so much! I couldn't get why there wasn't es but ihn either!

[martaccia]

You're welcome, glad I could help :)

[philster043]

Thanks. I forgot that lack of grammatical context can sometimes confuse us with these sentences.

[kyky]

It depends on what was made. For example: "der Sportkurs" -> "ihn"

[RobertLunkez]

so, 'zum Glück' means Luckily?

[philster043]

Yeah, or Fortunately.

[DeeRamm]

For a bit I wondered what on earth "... ihn machen" could refer to. I finally figured it out.
They were making a snowman = "der Schneemann". ("Zum Glück" it had snowed :-)

[flis333]

why not "With luck we could make him."?

[olimo]

Maybe because "make him" is not so likely to be said in English. You usually make something and not someone (except when you make someone do something, but that is another situation).

[hutcho66]

Just in case anyone is reading this, 'could' is the past subjunctive mood and is 'können' in German. So "Zum Glück könnten wir ihn machen" would be "Luckily we could make it". 'were able to' is the past indicative mood, and is 'konnen' in German, so this sentence is "Luckily we were able to make him". I think that is why flis333 didn't pass it, though olimo and philster043 are right.

Look at http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/k%C3%B6nnen#German. Each verb has all of these moods, but the past subjunctive is usually only used with the modal verbs in German.

[philster043]

Yeah, as olimo said, "fortunately" or "luckily" is more commonly said in English than "with luck" although you do hear "with some luck, we were able to..." sometimes.