"Where are you from?"
Translation:Woher kommt ihr?
50 Comments
You could also write this sentence formally, as Woher kommen Sie? and Duolingo would accept it. Sometimes these miscategorised sentences appear in various lessons - it's part of the way Duolingo is partly put together by a computer program and partly by real people.
Couldn't the real people fix it? I mean I got this as a multiple choice question in a "testing out of the level" session, it was flipping annoying to have to check the obviously wrong pronoun, whilst being fairly but not totally sure that the other two answers both had the wrong verb
Frankly, I think it's better to mix some older material in with the new. That way we have to keep thinking instead of running on autopilot. And I'm also doing a "testing out of level."
I answered the question with "Wo kommen Sie aus?" = Where are you from? = Where do you come from? = What country do you come from? I assumed this would correspond to the possible answer "Ich komme aus Deutschland." From one of mizinamo's comments below this inference was wrong. The corresponding question is actually "Woher kommen Sie?" or "Woher kommt ihr?" or "Woher kommst du?" I am now down to one heart.
P.S. Duo asked the same question again. I got it right and tested out of level 4. :)
İt's not wrong. You should report it. There is no other way to ask. You can use both. Where are you from... Woher kommst du/kommt ihr? Or woher bist du/seid ihr?
"Woher kommst du" sounds a little better, but "woher bist du" is definitely not wrong.
"Wo sind Sie aus?" I Thought this was valid, asking where the person is from rather than asking where the person comes from, or do i need to use kommen instead of sein
Or have i completely misunderstood the meaning of "Woher kommen Sie?" and these sentences does not mean the same
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It gave me the correct/corrected answer of "Wo kommen Sie her?" (not "hier", as your last example above. I don't know if both are correct [her/hier] but thought I'd share what Duolingo replied) when I put in "Wo kommen Sie aus?"
I believe Woher (and other wo words) gets split in the questions in such a way, that Wo is the question word in the beginning of the sentence and the remaining part (her in this case) is at the end.
"Wo kommen Sie hier?" - is not correct. It doesn't work. It has to be "Wo kommst du her/Wo kommen Sie her?" or "Von wo bist du/Von wo sind Sie?" (a bit colloquial).
Not really, from my limited understanding of German that'd be more like saying "Where are you?"
It's not wrong, it's correct. Maybe not 100% grammatically correct (?), but the People in Austria would definitely ask this way.
"Where are you" means "Wo bist du".
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Could someone clarify for me? "Wir kommen aus Deutschland" the verb is kommen (or auskommen?) But it would not be "Wo kommen Sie aus?" because aus is understood and woher is a directional/preposition?
Wir kommen aus Deutschland - the verb is kommen
Wo kommen Sie aus? - you're right: we do not say that
Woher kommen Sie? Wo kommen Sie her? are used instead.
woher means "from where?"
So it doesn't specifically ask "from out of where?" -- that would be woraus?. But Woraus kommen Sie? would sound like "What do you come out of?", as if it would be an egg or something like that.
In the end, it might be convention -- aus Deutschland sounds just fine to me in a way that woraus? does not.
Sie (capitalised!) is the nominative form and is used when it's the subject of a verb such as kommen.
Ihnen (also capitalised!) is the dative case; you might have come across it in a context such as Wie geht es Ihnen? "How are you?", where the grammatical subject in the German sentence is es -- the two phrases do not translate literally.
Why it's not "Woher kommst du?" How I can figure out, that it's plural "you"instead of singular?
Why is "wo kommst du?" not an acceptable translation for "Where are you from?"?
I got this question in the Formal Sie section, but ihr is the default answer. Although the formal is also accepted, as well as the informal:
Woher kommt ihr? (plural you - y'all).
Woher kommst du? (informal you).
Woher kommen Sie? (formal you).
Wo kommen Sie her? (formal you).
"Aus wo" doesn't work in German. It's always "woher" oder "von wo" (f.e. Country) or "woraus" (f.e. buildig).
"Woher kommst du" should be accepted, too! It's a correct answer. Where are you from could mean both: "Woher kommt ihr" and "woher kommst du".
It's not technically wrong, I just believe they generally use the verb 'kommen' rather than 'sein'
I've been thinking what we normally use... And it would be "Woher kommst du?". But like we said before, "woher bist du?" is not wrong.
I wrote 'Woher sind sie' and they marked it wrong despite it being the English. If they want you to put 'woher kommen Sie' why don't they put Where do you come from? in the question?
I think "Woher sind sie" would translate closer to "Where from are you?" which (in English) could be acceptable as a form of "Where are you from," but it doesn't sound very good. As a matter of fact, it may actually be improper English, too. I mean, just try to use it in conversation:
"Mr. Higgins, where from are you?" (Interesting note: Grammarly marked "where from" as incorrect English on this example.)
No, it doesn't sound right, to me either. When I hear this phrase, my brain hears a bit of Old English influence in it.
"Woher kommt ihr", "Woher kommst du", and "Woher kommen Sie" all remind me of:
"Where commeth ye [from]?"
