"Mit keresel, házat?"
Translation:What are you looking for, a house?
20 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
I think it's demonstrating that the emphasis is on "what are you looking for"
This sentence requires punctuation to make any sense in English!
I don't understand this statement? Do they mean like an address (Are you looking for a house/address?)
More likely, someone wants to buy a house and e.g. a sales agent could ask this question.
It is the (indefinite) 2nd person singular ending. Verb bases which end in the sibilant sounds -s, -sz or -z (such as keres, tesz, or kérdez) take the suffixes -ol, el, or -öl for this conjugation.
The problem is they combined two questions in one sentence: "what are you looking for?" and "are you looking for a house?" We do that in English, too. We make it clear with voice intonation. Hungarians do, too, but Duolingo didn't supply that intonation. There should have been a significant rise in voice pitch on the penultimate syllable (ház) of the second question "házat?"
"a házat" would suggest there is one house that the listener can think of and you refer to that one. This isn't what either "a house" or "házat" means.
"egy házat" is quite similar to "házat" here, it seems to me both are accepted. Here, it's not important to introduce a new instance of houses, you can just talk about the house-like quality of the indefinite stuff you are looking for.
It would be best to make two sentences in English here for better understanding. What are you looking for? A house?
457
Ez a mondat magyarul nagyon furcsán hangzik. Csak az angol fordítás megjelenése után tudtam értelmezni, mit jelent.