"The secretary sits down onto the desk."
Translation:A titkárnő felül az íróasztalra.
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Asztal = table, iroasztal = desk.
I think the authors of this course should focus on simple basic expressions and situations and add some more elaborate sentences years later. Keep it simple in Beta and try to hold on to those dedicated students who are still hanging in - we gonna lose most with poor English translations and way too extended complicated sentences.
The poor English translations are the biggest problem for me. Also, inconsistent translations, where a word is accepted in one exercise and rejected in another one that is very similar. Then, in order to get through the section, I have to write a bad English sentence or else I'll be stuck in the section forever!
I do like the long and complex sentences because they're challenging, and they give me a good idea of sentence structure. I take your point, though, about people dropping out because of it.
If you lead up to a complicated sentence with similar simple ones so you'll have a chance to learn how to construct them then I'd say OK, a few longer ones are fine. However, in our course here we are faced with super long, sometimes artificially complicated ones right off the gate ... just to fail us? Maybe to show off how smart and witty they are, who knows. The bottom lines is that many of us simply can't accomplish their goal by getting tangled in these webs.
"move into a sitting position" is pretty much always "sit down" in English in my experience, even if you start off lower than the sitting surface -- perhaps because the last few centimetres of the movement are nearly always down, even if you had to move upwards first.
As I understand it, Hungarian is different here: it looks at the motion as a whole, and so you have kiül, felül, leül, ... depending on the relative positions of the start and end of the motion.
So since the desk is higher than the secretary's bottom, she would felül there in Hungarian even if she would "sit down on it" in English.
("sit up onto it", which I think I have also seen on this course, sounds odd to me. "sit up" for me is only "change your sitting posture so that your back is straighter", not a motion towards a sitting position at a higher point.)
I would say "the secretary sits on the desk." I realize that is ambiguous, as it could mean "the secretary is sitting on the desk" (a static, ongoing action) or the dynamic action of changing from a standing to a sitting position. It's true that English uses "sit down" to indicate the second meaning, but since she has to get up there before sitting, I don't think many people would actually say that. Unless this was a very tall secretary. So I think "the secretary sits on the desk" (as a perfective action) is valid and should be accepted along with "... sits down on the desk."