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- "The cheese is from Bavaria."
"The cheese is from Bavaria."
Translation:Der Käse kommt aus Bayern.
49 Comments
As for ist vs sind: It depends on the subject. ist goes with a third person singular (“he/she/it”); sind goes with a third person plural (“they”) or first person plural (“we”). The dictionary form “to be” of this verb is sein.
As for kommen vs sein: kommen literally means “to come” but it can also be used to talk about the place of origin of somebody/something. Usually you can also use sein in these situations (so “Der Käse ist aus Bayern” would also be fine), just don’t be thrown off if you hear kommen from a native speaker.
Von Bayern her is wrong, at least in Standard German (there may be dialects which allow it). The biggest problem is von though: The only geographic names where you can use von are islands (von Rügen, von den Malediven etc.) and single mountain peaks (vom Mount Everest). And even for islands (you rarely encounter talk about things originating from a specific mountain peak) I would prefer aus, particularly if that island (or group of islands) is also a political entity. In any case, von is not possible with Bayern.
You can add her: Der Käse kommt aus Bayern her, though it sounds extremely colloquial, particularly if the subject is a person. So colloquial in fact that I’m not entirely certain if Standard German explicitly allows it. Her is very commonly used when the place you’re talking about is a pronoun though: von da her, von dort her, von woher (woher is normally written as one word because it can also be used as such in the sence “from where”).
Using ist does not sound like a “birthing” situation if you ask me, it’s perfectly fine. But kommt does feel much more natural to me.
376
It's annoying, but it happens all too often. If you tap on the word in the sentence, a translation is provided.
Why need to Answer Bayern when original message says Bavaria?
For the same reason that if the English sentence had had Germany, your answer should have Deutschland in it.
When you're writing in German, use the German name of the place: Bayern.
When you're writing in English, use the English name of the place: Bavaria.
(And when you're writing in Serbian or Croatian, use that name of the place: Bavarska.)
When translating a sentence, you may have to translate place names, too, if they're sufficiently familiar or famous to have a specific version in either language.
290
In another exercise in this series it didn’t accept der Käse but insisted on den Käse, why?
German has grammatical cases – different word forms which show the role of the word in a sentence (although in modern German most of the marking happens on the articles, demonstratives etc). Der Käse is nominative case. It’s used primarily if the cheese is the subject of the sentence. Den Käse is accusative case. It’s used for the direct object (the thing which is directly affected by the verb action, e.g. *Ich esse den Käse. “I eat the cheese.”) as well as after certain prepositions.
Do you want me to put Bavaria or Bayern?
- Use "Bavaria" when you are writing in English.
- Use Bayern when you are writing in German.
It's like "Germany" versus Deutschland.
I believe Duolingo is fairly consistent in this. Do you have a screenshot where it shows or requires Bavaria in a German sentence or "Bayern" in an English one?
Every noun belongs to one of three categories (“genders”) which are usually called masculine, feminine and neuter. The article reflects the gender of the noun. Which gender a noun belongs to is mostly arbitrary and has to be learned by heart though (certain suffixes always make nouns of a particular gender, but more in most cases there is no real clue from the form of the word). The easiest way is to just learn new nouns not by themselves but together with the definite article: Not just Käse but der Käse. The der shows you that Käse is masculine gender.
113
This grading system is a little off. One letter off the misspelling and the answer is wrong. If I do so in English, I get the credit. Why is that?
Usually this happens if the misspelling results in either an entirely different word (e.g. isst “eats” instead of ist “is”), a different form of the same word (e.g. des (genitive) instead of der (nominative)). Sometimes it can also happen if your misspelled form does not exist but it is just as close to a different word/form as it is to what you meant to write. For example if you wrote *komms, that is obviously a misspelling because this form does not exist, but Duolingo can’t know if you wanted to spell kommt (which would be correct in this sentence) or kommst (which is the du form and therefore wrong) or maybe even komme (which is subjunctive and therefore also wrong here), so it may err on the side of caution and give you a mistake.
Generally, a one-letter misspelling is accepted as a typo as long as the result is not a valid word.
For example, typing house as hoyse would be accepted but typing house as horse would not -- since horse is a real word, just not the correct one in a translation for a German sentence containing Haus.
What was your entire answer?
why bayern if there is bavaria?
The English sentence has "Bavaria", so you have to translate it into the German name Bayern.
The English sentence has "cheese", so you have to translate it into the German name Käse.
It's the same principle, basically. German uses different words from English. That includes quite a few names of countries and "important" or well-known regions. (Lesser-known places generally don't have an exonym, i.e. a different version of their name in another language.)