- Forum >
- Topic: Hungarian >
- "A nagy repülőtér előtt egy p…
"A nagy repülőtér előtt egy piros busz vár."
Translation:In front of the big airport a red bus is waiting.
17 Comments
219
Please add the option to slow down the speaker. This option is available in the Spanish lessons and is quite helpful.
Am I the only one who thinks this sentence seems a bit heavy for a beginners lesson in Hungarian?
- 598
Duo must focus on Beginners who have no experience with hearing/saying correct pronunciation of the 44 different alphabetic characters. And, Duo MUST offer an option of a slower-speed pronunciation!
"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!
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".
Whoa! I still got this wrong, but I almost understood every word she said. And she says it quite fast, too. Making progress I suppose! I love the challenge of the listening exercises.
- 598
Beginners can NOT begin to keep up with the speed of this sentence! Beginners need a slow-speech alternative!
- 538
"A red bus is waiting in front of the big airport" is a more natural translation than "In front of the big airport a red bus is waiting" (which sounds clumsy in English).
- 447
Are you saying that you tried your translation and it was not accepted? Then maybe you should use the ⛿Report function. Posting alternative solutions here in the learner discussion is not likely to change anything.
Your word order is also possible in Hungarian: Egy piros busz a nagy repülőtér előtt vár. I cannot say whether DL's sentence is clumsy in Hungarian, and I have to take your word that it's clumsy in English (though I think it would make a good introductory line for a novel).
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.
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."]
- 218
Thanks for your reply JMaxGlobal. Unfortunately, I didn't find the reason/gramatical argument/logic why my alternate translation couldn't be accepted. :D
