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- "Die Damen sind wichtiger."
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But, they don't say that the ladies are more important than the gentlemen. We don't know here what they are more important than. This is simply out of context. Perhaps the men have something else to do than go out with the ladies and their friends decide that the something else is less important. Are you sure that the ladies are more important than fishing?
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Well, yes, if you want to take it seriously and play devil's advocate, but I would hope it was obvious I was mostly being facetious. :p
No, "The ladies are important" would not be a correct solution.
wichtig = important
wichtiger = more important
(cf. klein = small/ kleiner = smaller, etc. The -er marks the comparative form).
When an adjective is used after the verbs "sein" (to be) and "werden" (to become), it is not changed - it is the same for singular and plural and for all genders, e.g. "Die Damen sind wichtiger" (The ladies are more important), "Der Mann ist wichtiger" (The man is more important), "Die Dame ist wichtiger" (The lady is more important), "Das Buch ist wichtiger" (The book is more important). The adjective only changes when it is placed before a noun: "die wichtigerEN Damen" (the more important ladies) vs. "die wichtigerE Dame" (the more important lady). Thus, Duolingo's labelling is misleading.
There is a plural Genitive form of "wichtiger" in the strong declension of "wichtig" for use when placed in front of a plural noun in the Genitive case if there are no articles in front of them. So, most of the time the plural does not look like that, but maybe there is a sentence somewhere in one of the other lessons that uses this form. Most of the time "wichtiger" is likely to be the comparative form.
I don't know. We could say "Die Taschen der Damen" to mean "The ladies' bags" or "The bags of the ladies" so without "the": "The bags of important ladies" can be interpreted as "Die Taschen von wichtigen Damen" but I would think it could be "Die Taschen wichtiger Damen" as well. I hope a native German will step in and help us with that.
In English there are words that can have an "-er" added on the end or can have "more" added in front, but some words can't have an "-er" added, is it the same in German?
In English you can say "I am funnier." or "I am more funny."
In English, you can only say "I am more important" You can't say "I am importanter"
No, it's not the same in German. German comparative forms of adjectives always add an "-er", never the word "mehr" (= more).
There are some irregularities – some adjectives additionally add an umlaut (e.g. alt - älter = old - older), others have totally irregular forms (e.g. gut - besser = good - better), and adjectives that end in -er/-el/-en drop one "e" in the comparative (e.g. teuer - teurer = expensive - more expensive). But the basic principle of adding an "-er" remains the same for all comparative forms.
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Duo says, the correct answer is: "The women are bigger." Hmmm. Wichtiger =/= bigger ?! I do not think so.
Oh! With this sentence came an idea! would anyone else be interested in a gentleman's/lady's skill, one you could buy with lingots? It would be neat to learn things specifically like "After you, Madam" and "Thank you very much sir!" and so on, in a specific lesson c: Is this a good idea, or just silly?
A politeness skill? Or a skill that contains more sentences with "Dame" and "Herr"? Though I would pay for a skill that focuses on idiomatic polite phrases, I wouldn't bother with one which only has in it what I could piece together myself, such as, "Vielen Dank, Herr!: and "[Ich gehe] hinter Ihnen, Dame."
Sometimes I feel as if you can't win around here :)
On the one hand, I agree that translations should be as direct as reasonably possible; on the other hand, there are often enough people "throwing the dictionary at" Duolingo and saying that "Spudlin's English–German dictionary says that 'bird' can mean 'Mädchen' and so this translation should be accepted!!!". Or "But 'weightier' can mean 'more important', as in 'Let us talk of weightier matters', so it should be accepted!" (even if that's not the most common word in English).
I'll have a look at the accepted alternatives for this sentence, though, and see whether I can cull them a little.
In computation, we use edit distance to measure the difference between strings, and it is probably "weightier" and "importantant" are more close to each other. The word "weightier" may make some sense: look at the similarity between it and wichtig.
Not necessarily a word. Consider "The ladies are bigger" which also has no word for "more" -- the comparative meaning is carried by the -er ending there.
So also in this sentence, where the -er ending on wichtiger shows the comparative sense.
German uses -er for comparative more than English, even on long adjectives. For example, the comparative of ungewöhnlich is ungewöhnlicher, even though the base adjective has four syllables.
Please keep the topic to the grammar of the sentence, not its content.
Either you are being serious, in which case this sentence discussion is not the place to voice your concern, or you are being tongue in cheek, in which case your point has been made before (over 300 times, if I count the upvotes on the comments at the start of the two topmost threads).
Also, Duo features bears drinking beer and horses eating holy potatoes. It's for learning the grammar and vocabulary of a language, and there are all sorts of sentences, some more useful than others and some true and others false.
If keeping the topic to the grammar of a sentence were the real intention here, this controversial sentence would already have been removed. Just look how extended the discussion is, and most comments are not exactly about grammar.
Keeping this sentence as it is is not much different from keeping racial slurs about black people.... all for the sake of "grammar".