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- "Tourismus hilft den Menschen…
61 Comments
Should 'Tourism helps people' have been accepted? 'The people' is already so vague that I'm not convinced a definite article makes a difference.
Yes it should because I can't think of what context you would say "Tourism helps the people"
423
I think it's the difference between people in general (tourism is a good thing, it helps people) and a particular people (we don't need to feel guilty about swanning around this desperately poor area, because tourism helps the people). I am probably wrong about this, but would vaguely have expected that 'Menschen' would have implied the former???
In your second example, the natural English sentence would be "these people."
There are very, very few circumstances where "the people" would be the most natural verbiage.
"Tourism helps the people" sounds like a propaganda poster.
I assume that wasn't the intention.
Yes, but that would be better described by the word "Volk" than Menschen
I agree 100%! No native English person would write the people in this context!
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Yes. You'd use 'the' in English if you were referring to a specific group of people which the context makes clear. This is a translation error, in my opinion.
- 423
I'm beginning to realise, though, that German itself drops the article freely when it doesn't want it. No other language I've ever learnt does that, so I instinctively assume it's up to my English instinct whether I keep it or not, but I'm making a guess that 'Tourismus hilft Menschen' may be a valid German sentence, right?
Your sentence is also grammatical but it implies that tourism helps only some people, not all people.
That's funny considering the English implication is the opposite - "Tourism helps people" (the far and away more natural but still marked incorrect translation here) implies that tourism is helpful for everyone.
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Riiight. Which in certain circumstances might be true of 'Tourism helps people' too, but not always ... Ah, the nuances.
- 837
Is "Der Tourismus hilft Menschen" synonymous with "Der Tourismus hilft einigen Menschen"?
Not quite; Menschen without article is vaguer in terms of numbers than einigen.
It could be a few, it could be several, it could be many.
einigen is only "some, a few".
Why is this in dative case? Can "helfen" be translated as something like "offer help to" or is it just a rule?
It's just a rule that helfen takes an object in the dative case in German.
If it helps you remember that, you can think of it as "give help to" or "offer help to" but those are not good translations, in my opinion -- the most straightforward translation is simply "help".
A bit like, say, folgen which also takes a dative object, but you would translate it simply to "follow" and not "make following to" or something like that.
Hmm, sometimes I wonder how long it would take me to figure this out on my own! You rock!
"tourism helps mankind" should be accepted? Or it's something completely different from this?
Hopefully developers from Duo check these, because this is actually a flaw. The correct way of speaking, or at least more correct way to speak is what is most accepted, coloquially. And it is definitely correct without the article in this case.
I've noticed that articles are sometimes required, sometimes not; contractions and word substitutions arr sometimes accepted, sometimes not. It seems random which means the developers may not have been following any strict guidelines. When the response is coming from your mother tongue, or more dom language, the response validation should be more liberal.
It's a bit disappointing that so many people have commented here, and yet no moderator has chimed in to clarify whether "tourism helps people" is a satisfactory translation. It was rejected by Duo today, and I reported it. "Tourism helps the people" is feasible in English, but in a very specific context. Is that what the German is saying here? Or do they just use the definite article more than we do, as do the Romance languages, for example?
This is not good English. In English, we do NOT use the definite article. We say: Tourism helps people.
In plain English you don't say "the people" unless you want to emphasize a certain people in particular. Translation en english should be "Tourism helps people"
In addition to the comments already made, I'd add that you can only use "the people" if you add some further qualifier, such as "...the people in Germany/the village/the region." Without that qualifier, "the people" is das Volk, and "people" is die Leute.
Isn't "the people" plural? And therefore shouldn't it be "die Menschen", and thus "der Menschen" in dative?
"the people" = die Menschen which is plural, yes -- and thus den Menschen in the dative case.
Remember that plural is not the same as feminine!
Feminine dative is indeed der (e.g. der Frau "to the woman"), but plural dative is den (e.g. den Frauen "to the women").
Your comment cleared a lot of doubts I had about Dative case. Thank you, I'm giving you 5 lingots.
Whoa, seems there's a bug in lingot offering. When i gave you 4, it showed 4 in your comment. But after giving the fifth one, it showed 2 as total lingots for the comment!
I gave three more to keep my word :). Now it shows you got 5 lingots. But it deducted 8 lingots from me. I don't care :), just wanted to mention I found a strange bug.
(hmm... maybe that's the service charge...)
I think that's due to a general problem with changes not being reflected instantly -- editing or deleting a comment may also take a few seconds to be consistently visible.
If you give away the lingots one at a time, refreshing five times or so and waiting a minute or so between each give-away, things will probably work fine. But if you don't refresh each time and don't wait, then you might get odd results.
Yes. Full speed rendering by female speaker says "die Menschen". Slow speed correctly says "den Menschen". Elsewhere, male speaker is correct at full speed. Reported.
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"The people" does not sound right, unless one is referring to a particular group of people, for example, "the people of Ohio."
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Yes, I agree, surely you would rather say Tourism helps people. 'the people' seems a very unlikely thing to say, one might rather say 'those people' etc. Also, how would you then say, 'Tourism helps people' in German?
no it doesn't. because of tourism everything becomes the same and there is less and less authentic stuff left :/
There's so many words in German for people. But how Menschen could mean either human or people is kind of confusing
