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- Topic: Hungarian >
- "Have you met the girls yet?"
"Have you met the girls yet?"
Translation:Találkoztál már a lányokkal?
20 Comments
Can all Hungarian verbs in the past tense be translated to the present perfect in English? Is there anything similar to the present perfect in Hungarian?
27
There is only one past tense in Hungarian. When you translate to English, you have to decide yourself which English tense is most appropriate for the given sentence in its context.
Many times it is the preverb (Hungarian: "igekötő") that makes it a completed action.
Olvastam a könyvet - I read the book / I was reading the book / I have read the book.
Elolvastam a könyvet - I have read (finished) the book.
Read up on "telicity'" if interested, that is the linguistic term for this.
- 1491
Looking through the comments here I see that there's no mention of "még" Not being accepted by Duolingo only "már" (even though "még" is shown in their own translation) I've reported it, but curious, has no one else come across this problem?
- 735
Ah, I think the suggestion popup stumbled a bit over itself there. I'm still not sure if those suggestions are automatically generated, but they should be editable, and translating 'yet' as még is.. pretty much nonsense.
már - yet
még nem - not yet
- 1491
Also " Találkoztatok" is not accepted. We can't know if this question is directed to more than one person or not.
Is the word order "Mar találkoztal a lányokkal" correct? I guess this would emphasize some impatience, perhaps, as it would emphasize the "already"?
If you mean in lányokkal, it's not -al but -kal, and it's an assimilated form of -val which is the ending that means "with".
So a lányokkal is literally "with the girls".
Different speakers of English phrase it differently.
I would have "Have you met the girls yet?" rather than "Did you meet with the girls yet?". "meet with" sounds too much for me, but for some native speakers it is the way they speak.
Probably, all versions should be accepted.
Actually, to me the phrase "meet with" conveys a rather different meaning than "meet." It's possible this is just how I see it, but to me "meet with" creates an image of someone meeting up with someone at a predetermined place — perhaps they talked over the phone and decided they would go to a café together. "meet with" means that you're meeting with someone for the purpose of doing something or going somewhere together.
On the other hand, "meet" simply implies that you've seen the person and talked to them a little. It means that you're now acquaintances.
Like I said, though, that's what those two things mean for me, so other people might disagree.
- 576
that's what I'm asking. Saying did you meet the girls yet to me means do you know each other, are you familiar with them, or maybe did you see them. On the ather hand, did you meet with the girls means did you have a meeting in order to do something.
- 1491
I agree with one or two of the posts on here that "to meet with" has a slightly different meaning than simply"to meet" and as such should be the preferred answer, but I'm sure both will be accepted in time.
Yes, I agree with this. If the sentence had said did you meet WITH the girls yet, then the talalkozik verb is accurate. But because there was no with in the sentence, the more understood meaning in English is do you KNOW them, not a meeting. That is why I used the megismerkedik verb. But was marked wrong. I don't agree.
- 735
According to the comments above, you had that ending before. :D
I don't think this suffix is taught anywhere else in this course, sadly, so I'll give you a briefing here.
The suffix in question is -val/-vel. If the noun ends with a consonant, however, the v gets assimilated. It translates in English as "with [noun]":
vízzel - with water
az autóval - with the car
lánnyal - with a girl
a barátnőmmel - with my girlfriend (I personally like this one.)
For the demonstratives "with this" and "with that" you can actually choose if you want to go with ezzel/azzal or evvel/avval. Also this suffix is introduced in the 'Time' lesson probably because you sometimes express timeframes with that suffix: tavasszal - in spring (lit. "with spring"),
Now for the verb: találkozik is a reflexive verb and means "to meet up" (literally "to find yourself"). Due to its reflexive nature it cannot take a direct object, so you express that you're meeting someone with the -val suffix instead.
