"Como você chegou a estes livros raros?"
Translation:How did you get these rare books?
22 Comments
Sentences like these should be removed and replaced with better clearer examples.
I agree. I thought the sentence meant ‘How did you come by those rare books.’ This was rightly graded as erroneous, but the correct translation looks like my translation was right! There's (almost) no clue that we're actually talking about arriving rather than acquiring.
To figure that out I had to spend quite some time with dictionaries which wasn't made easier by standard combinations like ‘chegar a uma conclusão’.
If this sentence needs to be in the exercise (maybe because it's so confusing) it has to be accompanied by an explanation that is revealed when you check your answer.
I wrote "How did you get hold of these rare books" and got it wrong. But "chegou" seems like it's used in similar fashion as "how did you arrive at that conclusion", which means how or what did you do to find the right answers, so the exercise in question is way too strict.
Perhaps, or at least move it to a later set, "up the tree". I did guess the meaning successfully ("how did you find..."), but there seems to be multiple correct translations and that just causes too much confusion and frustration.
i am guessing the direct translation would be 'how did you come by those rare books' this sentence would be correct in English, but rarely used.
"To get" is more prevalent than "come by" but the second option is not so rare.
Can't this mean 'How did you get these rare books'? or even 'How did you find....?' The given translation doesn't make much sense in English.
rare in english refers to scarce, difficult to find. Raro en portugues also means that, but the most used sense would translate to strange or weird. So I think this is wrong.
"Rare books" is used all the time for those book stores who specialize in first editions...
Maybe there's a word missing: "Como você chegou CONSEGUIR estes livros raros?"
I think that conseguir makes sense, but perhaps it should be written like this: "Como você chegou a conseguir estes livros raros? Not 100% sure.
word reference.com:
5)... a situação chegou a surpreender o director.
6)... nunca os dois que sois poderíeis chegar a ser um só.
Yes, that seems better - even if it is not the same language, Spanish has a similar form: "Cómo llegaste a conseguir ..." I wasn't sure, so I left the "a" out
"Como você chegou a esses livros" means "how did you get to those books", "how did you come by those books", "how did you find those books".
If you use "conseguir" alone, "como você conseguiu esses livros":
- How did you manage to find/get those books?
You can't use both together in this sentence with "como". "Chegar a + verb" means "to come to the point of + verbing".
- Você chegou a falar com ela? = Did you manage to talk to her? / Were you able to talk to her?
- O som era tão alto que chegou a quebrar a janela = The sound was so loud that it came to the point of breaking the window. (It even broke the window)
Using both together is used sometimes, but never in questions with como. It will mostly mean "to be able to", but following a process.
- Ele chegou a conseguir falar com ela = He managed to her (at some point)
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If someone asked me this sentence in English, I'd think they were either asking what method of transportation I used to get myself to where the books were, or else what I had to physically move in order to access them. Not so much what methods I used to acquire them.
Your thought on this is also my first thought, how did you get to the source or location. Then I thought from the context, "How did you get to (have possession of) these books. It leaves if open to conjecture. Perhaps "chegou a" should be taught as "get" and drop the "to" from the English.
A lot of negative comments on this one, but "how did you get these/those rare books" was accepted as of 07/04/2014. Made sense to me, so I guess they fixed it :)
But it is wrong. I looked the word ‘chegar’ up in Priberam and it cannot be used in this sense. It means ‘to arrive’.
"Chegar" is very versatile and doesn't just mean "arrive" in the physical sense: http://en.bab.la/dictionary/portuguese-english/chegar-a
- 1810
Won't you ever accept words given in "hint". It's tiring when you do not accept ANY of the words proposed in "hint"!
Correct me if i'm wrong DL!
Chegar = to arrive
Pegar = to get
Ficar = to get / stay
Obter = to obtain / get
Encontrar = to find
Why at this stage of the game are you still changing verbs and meaning but not the hints?
Ta much :)
