"Sie fehlt mir."
Translation:I miss her.
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I think the confusion here is not stemming from a difference between German and English grammar. It is instead that the verb itself has a different meaning. In German it is the subject of the sentence that is in a state of being missed by him, where as in English it is the subject of the sentence that is committing the action of missing her. I hope that is correct and makes sense. Please correct me if not.
Youre right navethechimp. It can also be thought of meaning "she is missing to me"
My version is: "she is missed by me" I think we have the same idea. Interesting to see how different people's brains work
This made more sense to me when I saw "to lack" as a translation of "fehlen" (http://dict.leo.org/ende/index_de.html#/search=fehlen&searchLoc=0&resultOrder=basic&multiwordShowSingle=on) -> "She is lacking to me". That, at least to me, seems less ambiguous about the direction of "missing" than "to be missing".
That seems to me to be how the difference is & where the problem lies. We just have to reverse our thinking. . . thanks for the explanation!
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Yeah, I think a more accurate English equivalent to gefallen is "to please" or "to appeal to".
Not really, since this type of grammar is similarly found in Italian... "loro me piaccono" being I like them, "lei me manca" being I miss her. This is translated more like "She is missing from me."
I got this one wrong in French too. It's a weird, backwards way of thinking for us English speakers! But it's like "Das gefaellt mir", and "Es tut mir leid", so I'll get it right eventually. . .
I hate this verb (not really, but it's hard to grasp for an English speaker). I just have to think of it as meaning "to be missing from," and 'from'='von,' which is a dative preposition, so it takes 'mir' instead of 'mich.' The same with gefallen and gehoren ('to be liked by' and 'to belong to'- 'bei' and 'zu' are also dative prepositions so they also take mir or dir etc.).
I think it's importat to note that, here, is the verb "fehlen" (be missing) that requires Dative, like a Dative preposition would.
I don't know how this question can be improved, but if you don't know the verb "fehlen" and you learn it with this sentence, you will be told that "fehlt = to miss". Then you see that the subject is in German is "Sie" and you can only learn by failing! :)
I got it wrong too. BUT, looking at it, the mir should have been a clue. The sense of it is something like "she is missing TO ME". If she missed me, I'd expect it to be mich rather than mir.
No, you can't. "Fehlen" has to be used with the dative case. So you could say "Ich fehle ihr", but that would mean the opposite: "She misses me". The structure is like "Sie gefällt mir" (=literally: She appeals to me, i.e. I like her).
So you could translate this more literally as "She is missed by me." Is that right?
The construction is very like "She fails me", if that helps people remember.
...with luck, only a very few of you will be completely confused by it...
Because in german "fehlen", the object is the thing which is being missed.
Thus, "Peter fehlt mir" is translated with "I miss Peter". Another example: "Das Fenster fehlt bei diesem Haus." -- "The window is missing on this house".
Isn't that backwards? The subject -- akkusativ ("sie") -- is the thing being missed and the indirect object -- dativ (mir) -- is the thing doing the missing.
thank you Katherle for your prompt reply to my question, I should have realised and understand now
As a native English-speaker, it is natural to read the sentence in order. Therefore, it reads (to me) that "She misses me." So my question would be, if I want to say that "she misses me," would I reverse the order and say "mir fehlt sie?"
If I'm not mistaken, this is structured in a similar way to French, where you would say "Elle me manque" (literally "I lack her")
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You are not the only one. At first I was annoyed, till I realized what the word actually meant and just laughed (half embarrassed) at myself hie hie
I am getting confused with all with words for missing. I get verpassen is to miss something - like lunch ( i remember it as is pass it (accidentally) and then there was vermissen which means you miss something - as in you long for it. But now theyve introduced fehlt. Googling it it seems it means - to be missing. but here it is used in the same way as i thought vermissen would be?
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For those struggling to grasp this sentence, try thinking of it as a kind of poetic sentence. Technically you can also say 'Ich vermisse sie' but 'sie fehlt mir' is more poetic. Mir being more like 'to me' than 'me' in this context. There is no good translation really, but to capture the feeling of this sentence would be something like 'To me, there is a lack of her presence' or 'To me, the lack of her is present' It maybe sounds a bit weird but it really is a sentence that can't really be compared to 'I miss her' because it packs a lot of meaning into three simple words.