"Én nem tanár vagyok, hanem diák."
Translation:I am not a teacher, but a student.
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Could the phrase also be "Nem tanár vagyok, hanem diák"? It's my understanding that Hungarian verbs already contain the subject information, or am I wrong?
Szia, fmk64! Köszönöm szípen! Is the "Én" there for the purpose of stressing the fact that "I am NOT a teacher"?
Yes, that's righ - it is there to stress the statement. I actually wanted to mention it in my previous comment.
In english you need to say I am not a teacher but a student. Obviously in hungarian you can omit the egy
You can say it either way - the indefinite article is not obligatory, like, e.g., in German.
Should probably be - but from the context it can be assumed, that an adult university student was mistaken for a teacher.
How could someone discern that the a article is to be used, instead of "the"
The hungarian sentence didnt use the definite article therefore the english sentence also shouldnt use it. In hungarian one doesnt need to use indefinite article in this case (though it is not wrong to add it), but in english one has to use it when talking about someone being a student, worker.