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- "Birds, cows and kindergarten…
"Birds, cows and kindergarten teachers are flying around the airplanes."
Translation:A repülőgépek köré madarak, tehenek és óvónők repülnek.
17 Comments
These silly sentences seriously make my day. I just want to say thank you to whoever wrote all these sentences about kindergarten teachers. XD
It is really good to know that somebody enjoys all those extra letters. Maybe the rest of us can be more tolerant. :)
Anyway, I see a potential mismatch here. What is your first thought when you see "they are flying around the airplanes"? What are they doing? Could it be that they are heading toward the airplanes, to be positioned around them? Or are they already around the airplanes and circling them? Could it be both or only one of them? Because "köré" is one of those directional postpositions, meaning "(heading) toward something, to end up positioned around it".
The English sentence evokes an image of them flying around the airplanes already circling around them. However, I am aware that köré is one of the directional postpositions, so I more or less knew that wasn't what was being expressed.
I took the English translation at face value, and it is definitely missing this implied final state.
Your explicit translation is the only way of getting the sense across in English, unfortunately, and is something that we wouldn't generally say in English. At a push, we'd probably skip 'flying' altogether and say 'they are positioning themselves around it [in the air]'. This translation probably wouldn't work in this setting, where we're trying to learn the vocab like 'to fly' as well. Maybe a hint could appear when 'Submit' is clicked, to remind us what the meaning is in this lesson block?
127
Flying kindergarten teachers. Again. Sajnálom. De kezd irtó unalmas lenni. Sorry. But it is getting really tedious.
The hover-hint for "around" is "körül", and not "köré", and I don't know why.
- 269
As I think you've figured out, it's because "around" is only a correct translation for "körül", not for "köré". The latter is one of those hard-to-translate concepts that Duolingo's word-by-word approach simply doesn't work for.
- 187
Do Hungarians use fly colloquially to just mean "move rapidly" like in english? For example, "he's flying around town?" or gandalf telling the fellowship "fly, you fools"? or does it only mean moving through the air?
It only means whoever wrote these sentences had one (or more) too many.
There are some idiomatic meanings around flying, but not like that. There is also a frequentative version: "repked"/"röpköd", it is closest to "flutter" ie. how a butterfly or a small bird would fly around unsteadily. That verb is frequently used idiomatically. Things that can do that are words, thoughts, your super-excited mother-in-law when you go visit, etc.
And of course poets can do whatever they want with words. Mothers are known to have "flown" to their sons upon their long overdue visits.
