"A busz előtt tizenegy autó halad."

Translation: Eleven cars are moving in front of the bus.

[KatyLovesFrench]

how do you know when to put bus in front or the cars in front? I said that the bus moves in front of eleven cars. How can I get this correct next time with a similar sentence?

[jsiehler]

Előtt comes immediately after the thing that it applies to. Since you see A busz előtt in the sentence, you know it means "in front of the bus."

The whole sentence could be arranged in several word-orders, but if you want the meaning to be "in front of the bus," then a busz előtt has to stay glued together as one unit.

If something was happening "in front of eleven cars" then you would have tizenegy autó előtt somewhere in the sentence instead.

A busz tizenegy autó előtt halad would be one way to translate your sentence, "The bus moves in front of eleven cars."

[KatyLovesFrench]

Thank you so much! Up until this point I was always just guessing the word order, like a puzzle! :)

[BlaHahn]

Wouldn't eleven cars pass the bus work?

[feyMorgaina]

No, because the cars aren't passing the bus. In this sentence, they are already in front of the bus, so the act of passing the bus has already happened anyway.

[eva814416]

I gave the correct answer, yet it was considered wron! How come?

[REMason1]

Wouldn't 11 make auto plural? I expected to see a "k" in there.

[Ksenia139960]

It is in the lesson tips.

"In English, nouns that follow a number are in the plural, but in Hungarian, they are in the singular."

When a noun has a number in it, that noun will remain in its singular form, and its verb will be in the 3rd person singular form, not the 3rd person plural form.

[feyMorgaina]

"Eleven cars proceed in front of the bus" is an accepted answer (2019-07-29).