"A nagy repülőtér előtt egy piros busz vár."
Translation:In front of the big airport a red bus is waiting.
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878
Please add the option to slow down the speaker. This option is available in the Spanish lessons and is quite helpful.
I am sure this course is great, if you learned Hungarian as a child, and you want to improve. But for a beginner? A lot of the basics is missing, or not given enough attention. As a result a three-year-old came up to me, started talking, when i wss at the playground with my son. I have no idea what he said. Despite all my knowledge in Hungarian grammatics.
708
"In front of the big airport waits a red bus." This seems like a very fine alternative translation to me. The Duolingo team didn't think so.
The course is still in beta and many fine, upstanding alternative translations are not in the system yet. You can help by reporting missing translations as you come across them and the program tells you that you are "wrong" because it didn't know your version yet. So please report such missing sentences from the exercise (not here in the discussion threads).
Thank you!
708
Fair point and thanks for the reminder. Great the Magyar Csapat (Hungarian Team) got this program off the ground. I usually do just that - point out what I think are acceptable alternate responses. I had a feeling I shouldn't be Duolingo-ing at 1:30 in the morning. Too easy for frustrations to creep in! Cheers, Max
I just failed with "a red bus is waiting in front of a big airplane"
Normally, though, it's not correct in English to say "by the airport waits a man" (for instance). I can't explain why, unfortunately, but compare with a sentence like "By the airport eats a man" <- it sort of sounds like "eats" belongs more to "the airport" than to "a man".
Because egy piros busz előtt means "in front of a red bus".
A postposition such as előtt refers to the thing that stands in front of it.
A bit like how a preposition in English such as "by" or "in front of" refers to the thing that stands after it. You can't change "In front of the big airport a red bus is waiting" to "The big airport in front of a red bus is waiting" and keep the same meaning -- "in front of" has to be in front of (heh) the thing that it modifies and can't just stand anywhere in the sentence.
716
Your english translations are sometimes really meaningless... we are here to learn Hungarian, not to waste our time figuring out in which fancy way we need to write the English sentences
Why cannot I say: A red bus waits in front of the big airport. There's another example in this lesson, where the translation is in the same way..... Where is the difference?
708
While I appreciate your frustration with what often seems like arbitrary word order (I myself often report suggestions for alternate translations) -- in this case, I don't believe that your translation is entirely correct. Just rearrange two words, and you get a perfectly fine sentence: " In front of the big airport, a red bus is waiting". [Instead of "... is waiting a red bus."]
862
Thanks for your reply JMaxGlobal. Unfortunately, I didn't find the reason/gramatical argument/logic why my alternate translation couldn't be accepted. :D
So maybe my logical approach to this is flawed, but I have gone back to grade school sentance diagramming to figure out the Hungarian word order of sentances.
In most cases it seems to be (without articles/adverbs,etc.) Subject, object of the preposition, preposition(al phrase) then verb. Except this one...preposition(al phrase) object of the preposition, subject, verb.
The sentance seems odd to me in both English and Hungarian, but I guess it isn't wrong, just not a typical way of speaking? Maybe more useful if writing a story?