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- "Lunch is at my parents' hous…
"Lunch is at my parents' house."
Translation:Das Mittagessen ist bei meinen Eltern.
68 Comments
Hi...it is less complicated than you think....if you say bei meinen Eltern....in german it implies where my parents " live" so it is at their house/home( zu Hause).....in Germany not everybody lives in a house...they live in apartments etc....so bei meinen Eltern ...that is the point....so forget the house! genitiv/ dativ... Dont mean to dismiss all your explanations but i think you venture tooo far with it..( native speaker)
Not really; the direct English translation, word for word, is "The lunch is at my parent's." In this case, "my parent's" is an implied, "my parent's house/apartment/etc". This phrase is said relatively often in English, though now that I think about it, never using a pronoun. I would say something like "Lunch is at Mike's!", But not something like "Lunch is at mine!"
I too feel this to be somewhat of an incorrect translation. In a learning course, you should not have different translations possible for the phrase you are learning. The word “house” not appearing in German is a massive oversight. Why not make the English phrase just “Lunch is at my parents’ ”. That would have worked and been just as effective. I understand the idea of it being something implied for a native speaker, but we are learners, not native speakers. Nothing is implied for us.
I feel that for languages like German that have a direct English translation that is reasonably different to how English is actually used, they should have a two step process for teaching you or give a cultural reference behind it. So with this sentence, they explain that it trainlates as "Lunch is with my parent's" but culturally means its at their living place. It's like with sentences such as "Es gibt Reis"- it means "There is rice" in real English but actually translates as "It gives Rice" and because Duo never explains this properly as you learn it (You end up rolling over the words and get given a combination that makes no sense) you are left clueless.
German really is a language where you need to get inside it and understand how the structure is organised in your own language so you know then what order or what phrasing is required to construct the German sentence. And strangely, I don't believe any language learning programme has ever realised this.
Only because Gcoid hasn't reached the lesson on genitive case (neither have I, actually...). I understand that it is a correct choice, and because I have been studying grammar away from Duolingo, I recognised this as a correct choice when I saw it, but I wouldn't expect many people to recognise it as correct unless they have learned about genitive case. Replacing the correct genitive case answer with an incorrect one would cause less confusion.
Cathan you got it almost right...first part is absolutely correct..just the examples have a flaw .ich arbeite bei einer Firma. Is correct...also okay is in einer Firma....but you don't say ...arbeite bei einem Büro....that would mean in close vicinity to an office....( if you had a Currywurst stand there ;)... You say arbeite in einem Büro...another example would be....ich wohne bei meiner Tante....oder mein schlüssel ist bei meiner OMA.
154
I got it wrong saying "Mittagessen ist an meinem Elterns Haus". Is it wrong because of the proposition or because of "meinem Elterns haus" or both ?
Both. You never use "am" for "at" in the sense of "inside of a building". A possible context where "am Haus" would be appropriate is if the house was still under construction and you'd take lunch at the construction site. Concerning the case, you need genitive to indicate possession: "Mittagessen ist im Haus meiner Eltern". Note that genitive attributes aren't normally put in front of nouns: "Mittagessen ist in meiner Eltern Haus" would sound really stilted and out-dated.
A tiny addition just for the sake of completeness: there actually is a singular form "das/der Elter" referring to one of your parents. But it is used very rarely and basically only in sociological or biological contexts. Learners can savely ignore it. http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Elter
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I said "Mittagessen ist bei dem Haus meiner Eltern" I think that uses the right ending for "mein" in Genetiv, is there another reason why it would be wrong?