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- Topic: German >
- "Du bist Student."
21 Comments
Interesting. From reading that, it also seems that it would be incorrect to say "Ich bin ein Berliner". I wonder if JFK knew that.
Take a look at the link given by @christian above. His speech writer knew what he was doing. EDIT: JFK's speech writer, not Christian's, of course. Perhaps I should try to get some sleep.
Is that the completely neutral way of saying someone is a student? Since there's no -er or -erin.
So, I could say, for example, "Ich bin Student." ? Seems a bit weird.. like it's begging for the Studenter. xD Or is that just something different?
As far as I know - after consulting several different dictionaries - the word Studenter (sic) does not exist in the German language. There is, however, another word for 'a student': Studierende/r (mf). It is one of those pesky nouns that behave like adjectives, and since I have not quite figured out how that works, I do not dare to say anything more specific about how it is used.
What? Why is it incorrect to say: "I am an university student"? There is a grammatical error with that "a university" instead of "an university". I learned that before a word that begins with a voul, the article should be "an" and not "a". Am I wrong?
It's the actual pronunciation that matters. The first sound in "university" /juːnɪˈvɜːsətiː/ is not a vowel. That's why you need to use "a".
I translated from English "You are a university student". I would assume student can be both male and female.
True! If you're translating from Englisch to German that should've been acceptable, since in English the gender isn't given. It can be either eine Studentin or ein Student!
(But I just noticed; you need to translate "a" and "ein/eine" if needed. That's why the app says it's incorrect.)
