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- "We are athletes, not lawyers…
"We are athletes, not lawyers."
Translation:Mi sportolók vagyunk, nem ügyvédek.
10 Comments
Is "Sportolók vagyunk, nem ügyvédek." a suitable translation, or is "mi" at the beginning necessary?
it should be fixed than, I got a bad mark for not including "Mi" at the beginning
This is what makes Hungarian on Duolingo so difficult. There are so many ways to say things: different word order, ambiguous words, with/without the pronoun. The program doesn't account for all of these possibilities.
Why include vagyunk? I thought we didn't need to include the verb if describing something that IS
I tried finding some proper English material about this, because my formal Hungarian grammar is very rudimentary, but didn't manage, so here goes. In "X is Y" type of sentences, in the third person plural or singular, using "van" is not allowed (eg.: Ők ügyvédek. A baba okos. Ő sportoló.), but for all other cases it is needed (Én sportoló vagyok, mi sportolók vagyunk, te sportoló vagy). Some other types of sentences may allow for leaving of van: eg.: Hol van az autó? or Hol az autó? are both good, but this doesn't work if there is no a/az: "Hol van Péter?" is good but "Hol Péter?" is not.
Ah, I actually did find something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copula_(linguistics)#Zero_copula, this a zero copula case :)
Oh yeah, now I remember. That’s a tricky one. Have a lingot, and thank you!
You're right, but that's just for the third person (he/she/it and they). For first and second person (I, we, you, you all) you include the verb.
Sportolók vagyunk - We are athletes.
Sportolók - They are athletes.
Sportoló - He/she/it is an athlete.
