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- Topic: Hungarian >
- "Ön angol?"
18 Comments
To clarify, this is asking is someone is from England, not that they are an English speaker, right?
Now I can't get it out of my head how similar ön and Öl sound.
Sind Öl Englisch?
[2019/04/16]
I heard it... ten times or so. And the more time I listened to it, the less plausible it was for "öl" to be honest...
No one really asks "Are you an Englishman?" in English, rather "Are you English?". After all, you wouldn't ask a woman if she's an "Englishman", but neither would you ask a man, as presumably his gender is not in question.
In English, we don't use "Are you Englishman?" very often, and when we do, we need an article in front of it, so it would be "Are you an Englishman?"
How can I know when ön is he/she vs you? I wrote "Is he English?" and it was wrong.
Simple enough: it's never he/she. It's a formal you that happens to take 3rd person conjugation. If there is no pronoun, you can't tell them apart, that's true... but here you have, it's ön => formal you.
Thank you! I don't think I would have figured out that a second person word would take a third person conjugation!
You're welcome :)
Have you read the lesson notes? I don't know by heart whether it was mentioned but chances are on yes, imo.
For conjugation: better get used to it, I don't think it was very special. Would you think "they" can refer to one person? (And this is not a new thing, nevermind the "rumors".) In German, formal "you", regardless number, is "Sie" ~ "they", with 3rd person plural conjugation. In Polish, it's like Hungarian as far as I know, separate singular and plural, both 3rd person.
I'm not sure about the app; on the website, you can click lessons and you have three options - starting the lesson, taking the level-up test (the keyhole icon) and reading the notes (the bulb icon).
I'm just guessing, this may be Basic 2 (https://www.duolingo.com/skill/hu/Basic-2-alternative/tips-and-notes) and unfortunately, it only slightly mentions ön and önök without any remarks on their usage. I think it would be the bare minimum to mention they go with third person conjugation - this was no problem for the Polish course; no formal speech excercises (at the beginning) yet they did mention it was going to be third person conjugation.
My answer: "Are you English?" and it came as wrong with a translation of exactly the same sentence...so, I was right! Duh! That is the second time that something like this happens to me.
