"Is the doctor walking outside or the English driver?"
Translation:Az orvos sétál kint vagy az angol sofőr?
37 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
273
I think you are close to correct. Since the doctor is being contrasted with the English driver, he should be given focus, so the adverb, which would normally be in front of the verb, gets pushed to after it in the manner of a preverb. Leaving the adverb in front of the verb removes focus from the doctor, which is wrong in this case.
The English sentence is unnatural. This makes it difficult to really understand what translation is wanted. The way it is set up suggests that it's going to be a contrast between outside or inside, or between walking and standing still or running or something; not between who is walking. Pix 89 underneath has a good alternative. Another could be: Is it the doctor walking outside, or is it the English driver? The "it" makes it clearer, I think.
Vezető can also mean driver. In fact, this is the normal everyday usage. So the option "Az orvos sétál kint vagy az angol vezető" should be accepted.
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The English is intended to mean "Is it the doctor who is walking outside, or is it the English chauffeur?", but we would never think to translate that to "Az orvos sétál kint vagy az angol sofőr?". They're just trying to make life a little easier for us.
To make that a teensy bit clearer.. one might say that the English is like an "either/or" situation. "Either the doctor walks or the chauffer (does)." The correct answer that Duo wants is NO COMMA separating that simple" either/or" thought . Az orvos sétál kint vagy az angol sofőr? NOT Az orvos sétál kint, vagy az angol sofőr? Check and see if you had a comma in your faulty answer. I did. It went through for me, without it.
459
I still dont see why it matters, in English the doctor can be walking outside or outside walking. ... i cant get this one at all
Duo seems to have a technical issue and I only came here to report it. I have done 4 lessons as I generally do each evening. For 3 of those lessons, the programme wouldn't finish. There was no "dah dah" which took me back to the lesson page. Instead, I had to go out of Duolingo and come back in. Fortunately, the system seems able to credit the completion of the lesson so I was able to get my points although I have no idea how many lingots I got because I never saw that page. I suspect this is a Beta issue but it's quite a serious one.
273
We certainly wouldn't want to miss out on a lingot!
I haven't experienced such a problem in my 200 odd days on the app. It may well be some Internet glitch. On the other hand, I have had periods when the sound would not work and found that I needed to reboot the tablet.
I suspect that your problems are more likely a result of inherent dodginess of programs that are hosted on internet platforms; more a problem of the platform than the program itself. I would hope that the Duolingo software would be language independent (though there would be a good argument in favour of writing something completely new for Hungarian), so the "Beta" designation would refer solely to its configuration for English-to-Hungarian.
I've finally come back to your comment and it was one that needed a bit of time before I could say anything much. I think you were right and it was my internet signal that was the issue. I've been working away reasonably diligently as residence in this country requires unless you're not going to bother. The problem seems to have abated and my store of lingots has grown accordingly. However, does anyone look at the end of week statistics for experience points? They're a complete nonsense aren't they? Just compare last week with what they said about the same week when it was the week before.
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I ignore my weekly report completely. I imagine there'd be some who derive a measure of satisfaction from them, and that there are the Scrooge McDucks out there who enjoy rolling in their lingots :) Anything to allow yourself to become hooked on something that will, hopefully, ultimately, educate you.
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You must learn to take those hints with a grain of salt. Yes, "is" does translate to "van" when it stands on its own, and is not used to equate two nouns, or to assign an adjective to a noun, or ... In this case, "is" is part of "is walking", which is broken up in the English construction of the question. You might like to consider a possible answer to this English question, "The doctor is walking outside, not the English driver.". Here "is" is reunited with "walking". This is what we call, in English, "present continuous tense", whereas "walks" is called "present simple tense". Both translate to the same in Hungarian, as Hungarians do not have the continuous concept as we have it in English, though they can, sometimes, use preverbs to convey his distinction.
When a verb appears in connection with location van isn't needed. Perhaps the best example of that is áll, (to stand). A ház előtt sok autó van or sok autó áll. we could do the same thing by contrasting a glove on the table and Éva on the table singing. Egy kesztyű az asztalon van. Éva az asztalon énekel. No need for van. We're not saying simply that she's there, we're saying that she's singing there. In this case the location is kint or outside but instead of simply being there the person is walking so instead of van we get sétál.
"Az orvos kint sétàl, vagy az angol soför" is not correct. If you want to start with "az orvos kint sétál" then you can continue with 'vagy bent?" in order to have the same type of question. Here the question is whether the doctor or the driver walk outside. Emphasis on the person. Az orvos kint sétál vagy bent - emphasis on the location.