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- "That is not a cat."
"That is not a cat."
Translation:Das ist keine Katze.
16 Comments
I did a translation earlier which was marked wrong: "Das ist keinen Apfel", Duolingo said it should be "Das ist kein Apfel" and in the comments section I understood the reasoning to be because Das is neutral and that takes precedence over Apfel which is male. I could be wrong and have asked for clarification on that forum listing.
But if the correct way of saying "that is not an apple" is "das ist kein Apfel" then why shouldn't "that is not a cat" be "das ist kein Katze"?
I did a translation earlier which was marked wrong: "Das ist keinen Apfel", Duolingo said it should be "Das ist kein Apfel" and in the comments section I understood the reasoning to be because Das is neutral and that takes precedence over Apfel which is male.
No; the reasoning is that you need the nominative case (e.g. der Apfel, kein Apfel) and not the accusative case (e.g. den Apfel, keinen Apfel) after sein "to be".
Here, Katze is feminine and so the nominative and accusative look the same; still, keine Katze is in the nominative here, not the accusative.
Das ist der Katze nicht - no good.
Right. Firstly, Katze is feminine; secondly, the English sentence has "a cat" and not "the cat".
So you would need not die Katze but eine Katze.
But since you're negating it, Das ist nicht eine Katze turns into Das ist keine Katze.
nicht as a separate word would be appropriate for a definite noun such as die Katze, but not for an indefinite noun such as eine Katze. (A bit simplified but a good rule of thumb.)
I suppose you could say that this is negating the object rather than the verb but that's the way it would be expressed in idiomatic German.