"Haben Sie diesen Artikel gelesen?"
Translation:Did you read this article?
16 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
Yes, the tenses are not as precise in German as in English.
Did you read this article? Have you read this article? Were you reading this article? Have you been reading this article?
All of these could be translated to "Haben Sie den Artikel gelesen.". If you want more precision, you have to use context, usually temporal adverbs like at that time/zu dieser Zeit, up until now/bis jetzt, now/jetzt and so on.
How would the question be in plural? "Did you read these articles?" The word itself dos not change - der Artikel / die Artikel.
Haben Sie diese Artikel gelesen? Have you read these articles?
Haben Sie diesen Artikel gelesen? Have you read this article?
Haben Sie die Artikel gelesen? Have you read the articles?
Haben Sie den Artikel gelesen? Have you read the article?
"Haben Sie diesen Artikel gelesen? Have you read this article?"
Was I wrong to translate it as "Have you read THAT article?" I reported it but they don't respond for a long time if at all.
I'm not entirely sure, but I believe that if you were to say "Have you read that article?" it would be "Haben Sie den Artikel gelesen?" since that and the are the same. :)
The pronoun is capitalised, meaning it's the formal you. Had the pronoun been spelled with a lowercase s, it would be translated as they instead of you. If you were to get this sentence as a listening exercise both answers would work since there's no difference in pronunciation.
There are a number of flexation classes for German nouns. Depending how you count maybe 12.
Artikel is in the group s/-. Here, the ending -n only appears in the plural dative.
The frustrating answer is, that you have to learn each noun with its flexation class (Nominativ/Genitiv). Or you guess.
271
My two cents is, this is too precise. "Have you read this article?" is more a spoken phrase you will hear many English speakers use it.