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- "Just go ahead, please."
"Just go ahead, please."
Translation:Gehen Sie nur voraus, bitte.
48 Comments
it's idiomatic, it's there to insist that you should go ahead and not protest out of politeness (which makes it part of the politeness fest itself, really)
The insisting part is the one to remember, only the context makes it polite. I believe it can be used to stress an interdiction too (native speaker to help here?)
In English "go ahead" is an idiom and it means roughly "you have the permission to start doing something". Example: "the results look good, just go ahead with the next test, please". It has nothing to do with going from point A to point B.
According to Duden this is not the case in German. The verb "vorausgehen" means only going in front of other people or going ahead of other people in order to arrive sooner than others. http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/vorausgehen
How would you translate the example "the results look good, just go ahead with the next test, please" into German?
163
Except during a Duolingo lesson on directions, better translations of "Just go ahead" (which has nothing to do with directions) include "Dann nichts wie los, bitte." and even "Bitte, bitte, bitte."
Duolingo frequently trips over translating English to German. The content contributors apparently don't know English as well as they know German. I understand that the software generates additional exercises, but presumably someone looks at what the software comes up with.
"Fahren Sie bitte voraus." would be useful in the situation in which you ask somebody to show you the right way by going by car/bus/train/cycle infront of you. Or in the situation that you will arrive late at a location and the other person should already start to go by car/bus/train/cycle to the location without you.
So normally you say "go ahead" in the meaning of "be an idol" and "start now" or "continue". I think "Fahren Sie fort"(=continue) is the best translation for "go ahead" with "fahren" and without context.
Having read the materiel below, I'm wondering where to place both "nur" and "bitte in such a sentence. I see that "nur" does not go at the beginning, and "bitte" comes somewhere in the middle or toward the end, but can they follow each other, or is there some other explanation for why these words must be in the places Duo assigns them?
The formal form is "Gehen Sie nur voraus, bitte." The "Sie" is a must be.
The informal, singular form is "Geh nur voraus, bitte." (=du-form). An alternative du-form is "Gehe nur voraus, bitte." In an order for "du" the personal pronoun is not used.
The informal, plural form is "Geht nur voraus, bitte." (=ihr-form) In an order for "ihr" the personal pronoun is not used.
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I could say I despise people who despise other cultures. But I won't. I only disagree with this opinion. The distinction between formal address and informal is common in many languages: German, French, Spanish, etc. If you want to learn a new language, you need to adopt, at least linguistically, new rules.