"You are tall, and I am short."
Translation:Te magas vagy, én meg alacsony.
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I do not understand why I have the wrong answer Magas vagy meg alacsony vagyok Could you tell me? :)
You are making a comparison based on subjects - in theory. This won't work if you drop the pronouns. This also makes impossible for "meg" to be right after the basis of comparison so it ends up in a position where it sounds like a very lowtier "és". Like "You're tall plus I'm short" but slightly worse because of the implied pronouns.
Why do I need to use meg here and not és ? - "Magas vagy és alacsony vagyok"
It's not ungrammatical, just... meh. You would expect more distinct clauses and more "progression" with "és". In sentences like this, they want you to figure out the sentence should have been more appropriately phrased using "whereas" or "on the other hand". :\
We use "és" when we list things (alma és körte is van/there's appel and pear too). "Meg" is used to press something or when we want to highlight a difference. In this case the other girl is tall and i'm short, which makes a difference, not a listing. If you have other questions about hungarian i'd like to help you, i'm native. My ig is the same as my name.
Pedig can be used instead of "meg" in this sentence, you are free to report it if it's still an issue.
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I actually used pedig and was accepted, but before when I wrote "te magas vagy es en pedig alacsony" it didn't work
This course needs a better explanation of word order. I will think I understand it, and then the pattern I've learned turns out not to apply to the appropriate sentence construction. The more different the word order is from English, the more imperative it is to explain word order in detail.
In detail? My grammar book covers it in about 30 pages!
However Zsuzsi has collected some useful pots in https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/30387434:
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/20169609
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/18806754
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/23906912
I thought the te and the "en" were implied in vagy and vagyok. (I wrote "Magas vagy, es alacsony vagyok...sorry, I cannot access the accents in this format.)
Nope. I took this trap in the Polish course too. Implied stuff 1. cannot be emphasized 2. cannot serve as the basis of a comparison (like this example). It's not like conjugations would serve as a macro for pronouns, they just give you the opportunity to drop pronouns when they don't carry any significant information. If I want to emphasize I'm talking about myself, sure I will use "én". Making a comparison based on subjects is surely a situation like this. ..that the subjects are actually "you" and "I"? Why should it make a difference compared to "the doctor" and "the teacher", for example? Topic is topic.
Could someone explain why it os required? I thought when it's about a noun or adjective it could be left out.
Why is Te vagy magas not acceptable? does vagy always go at the end?
It's correct but it changes the emphasis. It means "YOU are tall (implied: not someone else)"
Do the prononus strictly need to be there? What about magas vagy, de alacsony vagyok?
Nope, it's not correct. First of all, "de" means "but" in your sentence. Other than that, we are making a comparison based on the subjects. (Unfortunately the English sentence isn't very obvious about it but there were dozens of sentences like this in the course so one figures it out sooner or later.) What if you drop the subjects? It won't work. Read my other comment about it.
Amelia, I made the same mistake. If it helps, think of the English sentence as being: 'You are tall; I, on the other hand, am short' before translating. This in itself could raise problems as I've introduced a semicolon (does Hungarian use them anyone?) to avoid a comma splice but at least we'll get the 'meg' or 'pedig' after the 'én'.
Punctuation is very different from English; I'm not sure if semicolons are used at all and the main purpose of using commas is separating clauses.
I've used "Te" instead of "Ön" and my answer is not correct. Why is that? (My whole answer was "Te magas, én pedig alacsony")
You can say "Ön magas, én pedig alacsony (vagyok)" and also Te magas vagy, én pedig alacsony", but your version is not good beacuse you cannot drop "vagy" in the singular/2 conjugation.
So what's the problem with "You tall, me short"? I thought Hungarian allowed "to be" to be missing/implicit in certain sentences...
Because it's not Russian. Only "van" and "vannak" are to skip under certain circumstances. For other forms, this choice doesn't exist.
ok so when using "Ön" then "van" must be dropped because ön in HU is 3rd person.... right? (in English is 2nd)
It's slightly inconsistent regarding pronouns and you know the trick is they actually wanted you to write a contrasting sentence, like "You are tall whereas I am short". How does that change the sentence?
Because the verb used in the contrast has already been set in the first clause - you can see the subject in the second clause so there is no need to write the verb form out.
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Ti magas vagytok, én meg alacsony. I wanted to try swapping te for plural ti and it got rejected. Is it okay?
Almost, but then you need to say "Ti magasak vagytok, én meg alacsony."
