12 Comments
1097
Interesting that there is no plural in this sentence but it seems that apple/S maybe inferred by "nincs" there ARE no... (or) there IS no.... Any comments? Both are allowed btw but beware with Duolingo you will only find "appleS in the SHOP" whereas "THE apple is in the STORE"
- 330
Hm, you could go for singular or plural use in either language, but in English it's more natural so say "There are no red apples in the shop."
An even better translation for the intended meaning would probably be "The shop doesn't have red apples."
But this sentence isn't using the possessive structure, which is covered in other lessons. It makes much more sense to translate it more literally as "there are no red apples in the store", when that works perfectly well in English. We're not trying to come up with the "best" translations, we're trying to learn/teach the correspondence between English and Hungarian
For me, it did accept: There isn't a red apple in the store. I want to try RyagonIV's suggestion.
Why is it " are... apples" since it was nincs alma. When is nincsenek used then?
That's an adjustment to make it more natural I English. Literally it says "In the store there is no red apple", which sounds weird in English because we usually use plural for that kind of sentence.
But Hungarian doesn't use plural for that kind of sentence, so we don't say "nincsenek piros almák", even though that would be the literal translation of the English words.
- 330
Usually yes, but here it's about the nonexistence of apples, so the plurality technically doesn't make a difference. And where it doesn't make a difference, Hungarian prefers singular and English prefers plural.
