"Het huis van mijn ouders is klein."
Translation:My parents' house is small.
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This seems to be a general issue across all languages in Duo. The system has not been set up to accommodate the English s', though it seems to manage the 's ok.
As long as it doesn't tell my I'm entirely wrong, I'm okay with Duo thinking I have a typo.
That is out of our control. Take a screenshot and submit a bug report if it happens again: https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/articles/204728264-How-do-I-report-a-bug-
That would be the literal translation, also it's of my parents since from my parents doesn't really makes sense.
Well, grammatically it would be possible, for a single parent, but we know that that's not the case here. So, yes, it's wrong; here obviously "mijn ouders" would get an apostrophe in Dutch.
But foremost it's unusual. Normally, the house that you grew up in is "mijn ouderlijk huis" (my childhood home). The house that your parents own is "het huis van mijn ouders". The house that once was your parents' but no longer is, is "het vroegere huis van mijn ouders". You probably need to be comparing houses to get a structure like that.
Anyway, your childhood home isn't small, it's you who have become taller.
Because ouders already ends on an s and the genitive requires an extra s an apostrophe is needed here.
Mijn ouders' huis
But better to just say het huis van m'n ouders.
That's what I was wondering too, because I originally interpreted the sentence to indicate a context where the house was given to the person by their parents, and it is small (van= from right?)
It doesn't even report it as a typo. It just said I was wrong with that apostrophe. And this kind of possessive apostrophe is correct before or after the 's' here because it's multiple people but a single house. Cheesy.
Well, both option form grammatically possible sentences in English. However, we know from the Dutch that it's about more than one parent: "Ouders". Thus, in English it has to be parents' with an apostrophe at the end. Depending on the number of houses it could be "my parents' house" or ""my parents' houses", but the plural of "house" never gets an apostrophe.
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Is apostrophe not used in this kind of constructs in Dutch? For example, if I wanted to say "My father's coat," would it have to be "De jas van mijn vader"? Or would "Mijn vader's jas" be acceptable as well?
Yes, it is. However, as the rules for using a possessive apostrophe differ between English and Dutch, you can't use the English rules for the Dutch constructs.
So, in English, "My father's coat" is attached using an apostrophe because the s is not a part of "father", but merely is a possessive. In Dutch "Mijn vaders jas" doesn't have an apostrophe, as adding the s to "vader" doesn't hide the s in any way. This is different from "Mijn ouders' huis.", where an apostrophe is inserted to indicate there's a second s after "ouder": first one to form the plural "ouders" and then another one to make it a possessive.
All that for the Saxon genitive ('s). That's fine for English, but it's losing terrain in Dutch, where for nouns the Norman genitive ("of") is becoming more customary. So, "Mijn vaders jas." is fine, though you may have to report it a few times before it's accepted, but "De jas van mijn vader." is probably used more often in Dutch.
I was translating this using the tiles, and was surprised/perplexed that there was no choice involving the possessive (I had to say "My parents house is small.").
Can I get an explanation to as why van mijn is used instead of van mij. I thought mijn was only used as a direct possessive.
Because it's talking about "my parents" hence "mijn ouders" ..... It's not talking about his house. The house of(van) my parents (mijn ouders) is small.
No that's
Mine from/of parents have a small house.
Mine in dutch can also mean goldmine etc like in english btw.