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- Topic: German >
- "Das Wasser ist schlecht."
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1727
Well, I used to live in an apartment complex with a couple of duck ponds with signs that read "Effluent Water, Do Not Feed The Ducks".
Weird, huh? I fed the ducks anyway.
It just meant the water was untreated and not suitable for human consumption and might give you some terrible disease if you got into it.
It probably gave the ducks cancer too, but why are there even ducks in the desert? I don't know. Maybe because apartments set up duck ponds and tenants like me feed them?
"I find a duck's opinion of me is very much influenced over whether or not I have bread." - Mitch Hedberg
"Badly" is an adverb. "Goodly" is an adjective, not an adverb, and is an archaic form. You don't see "goodly" used outside the Bible and maybe Shakespearean-era literature, in phrases like "a goodly woman" or "a goodly sum".
By the way, you would never say "The water is badly". Doesn't make sense. You might say "The water flows badly". Remember, "badly" is an adverb, so it modifies the verb, not the subject.
das in German can mean "the" or "this" or "that".
Similarly with der and die.
In English, "the" and "that" (which used to be the same word as well) split up several centuries ago, but in German, they did not, so the same word is still used for the definite article ("the") and the demonstrative determiner or pronoun ("that"). And the distinction between close and far ("this/that") is not as strongly made in German as in English, so das etc. can often also be translated as "this".