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- Topic: German >
- "Sie trinkt Apfelsaft."
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Has anyone worked out why it's 'APPLE juice' Apfelsaft but 'ORANGES juice' Orangensaft?
Orangensaft and Appfelsaft are compound nouns. http://goo.gl/IyTdGF
- der Appfelsaft = der Apfel + der Saft = Noun + Noun (no linking element) http://goo.gl/KPOcYs
- der Orangensaft = die Orange + der Saft = Noun + en + Noun http://goo.gl/pn9y5o
So as you can see it is not plural Orangen, but actually singular Orange that first loses its ending -e and then the linking element en is used to combine two nouns.
But why is the linking element -en used for Orangensaft but not Apfelsaft?
Because "Orange" ends in a vowel. It's kind of like how in English we drop a "y" ending and add "ies" to make it plural.
Because of the gender of the words in the compound are the same in one and not in the other
Just like I wrote earlier: "Sie trinken Apfelsaft" :) And you can not decide whether it is You or they, because it's sie/Sie in German, and in this case the Sie is at the start of the sentence... so this leaves the decision up to the context.
You have to check the form of the verb (trinken) as in German verbs are conjugated.
Sometimes "sie" mean "they" "she" or" them" but how do i know when it means "she" when it means "they" or when it means "them"
They have different verb endings. Verbs for sie (they) generally end in -en, while verbs for sie (she) generally end in -t
If it were "They are drinking apple juice", the sentence would be "Sie trinken Apfelsaft." The conjugation of the verb would be different, in other words.
I said Applejuice and got it wrong, I always thought it was a compound word?
In English there is a space between apple and juice; in German there is not.
They used the form (verb+t) which could go for a guy or a girl but the form (verb+en) is used for they! Sometimes you have to look at the verb to identify the subject in German!
oh whoops, i thought apple juice was one word :/
Can someone please explain to me how to use trinkt, trinken ? Thank you in advance
Sorry I know this is a little of topic but I'm confused about Sie can it mean they and she ?
I answered "She is drinking apple juice" and was marked incorrect. How is this different from the reported correct answer of "She drinks apple juice?"
is Saft actually juice or like in Sweden "saft" is this concentrated thing you mix with water? It's mostly from fruits and stuff but it's not quite juice...
I answered "She is drinking apple juice", and it says it should be "she is drinking SOME apple juice." This seems incorrect to me.
Because der is masculine nominative.
But the apple juice is the direct object in this sentence, the thing directly affected by the action "drink", so it has to be in the accusative (not nominative) case.
Thus you would need the masculine accusative article den.
However, the English sentence just uses "apple juice" -- i.e. identifying the substance in general -- rather than "the apple juice" (referring to a particular quantity of apple juice that you had been speaking about before).
So even den Apfelsaft would be wrong in this sentence because it's not a correct translation for "apple juice":
Than how is it be written in deutsch if I want to write 'you drink apple juice' (in formal way, ie you=Sie)
My question is, how do you know if Sie means She or They? I'm always getting things wrong because I put S.he and it's They, or I put They and it's She.
I think my problem was only in CAPITALS but usually it is not a problem !
Yes. sie is used for both "she / her" and for "they / them".
You can tell the difference between "she / they" by the verb ending: -t for "she" and -en for "they" -- sie trinkt "she is drinking" versus sie trinken "they are drinking", for example.
You usually cannot tell the difference between "her / them" -- *ich sehe sie" can be either "I see her" or "I see them".
it would've been better to make us translate sentences from English to German ..like more !!
it would've been better to make us translate sentences from English to German ..like more !!
Rumour says that it's a business choice: translating into German is harder and frustrates/scares away more "casual" users, so you get fewer ad impressions than if you keep the course easier.
What some people do is, once they've become reasonably comfortable with the language, do "the reverse course", i.e. the course "English for speakers of German", in which case most of the translations will be into "your" language (meaning German here, since you're pretending to be a German speaker).
