- Forum >
- Topic: German >
- "Wie geht es diesem Mann?"
43 Comments
When you ask how someone is in German, the format is Wie geht es [person in dative case]?. It's literally phrasing it like "How is it going, to you?" or "How do you think it's going?". The most common example you will hear is Wie geht es dir?. Note that dir is the dative form of du.
Mann is a masculine noun, so normally would use der. In dative case this becomes dem. When we want to say "this" instead of "the", we use the articles beginning with dies- but with the matching ending. So we need diesem Mann.
741
Wow! It sounds so easy and I know there are these rules. Too much of them for a beginner I would say! :D And how long does it take for an ordinary , motivated but not very experienced person to use these endings properly and speak continuously? ;) There is so much that I must be aware of in a single sentence, it takes hours to create a few sentences properly. :D gender, case, place in sentence, adjective, word order, etc.
46
A suggestion to you: start to feel (yes, actually feel) the cases. Perceive how the concept "man" feels when it receives an action (I see a man) or when it is the subject (A man plays). Start to feel these differences, and then you'll start to be able to tell which case you must use not by thinking, which is dull and tiresome, but by just knowing it according to the "feeling" of that concept in that situation.
662
How to refer to a particular husband (wife) when one has several? For an English example, easy enough: "that husband cooks and this one does the dishes"
424
I'm not sure if it should be acceptable or not. 'How's it going?' is a common colloquial English alternative to 'How are you doing?' but not 'How are you going?'
Perhaps this is colloquial Australian English, but we would almost always say "How are you going?" "How is she going?" "How are they going?" etc. Often abbreviated to something like "How you goin'?"
Never "How are you doing?" "How is she doing?" "How are they doing?". While its correct, its very stuffy. Only a doctor would ask how someone is "doing". Here in Australia at least, that phrase is basically a sincere inquiry towards someones health, rather a general greeting or colloquial conversational starter about what someone is up too.
Personally i find this quirk of Duolingo very frustrating, because i get this question wrong every time. My mind automatically tells my fingers to type "going" instead of "doing".
I feel like im learning all the different branches of English when I read through the comments, and I relish examples like this. It is a shame you get punished by Duolingo, but I appreciate your contribution here. I know it's frustrating, but at least you know there are people that are thankful for your work.
489
Yeah, also Australian, this always trips me up because it's the phrasing that comes most naturally.
235
I wrote 'going' too, besause that's how I learned it at school (from France), and it is now accepted. 5/11/20
I wrote "Is this man well?" for "Wie geht es diesem Mann?" and it was marked wrong. While writing this comment, I think I came to understand why it's wrong, but I just want to make sure - "Is this man well?" would be something like "Wie geht es diesem Mann gut?" or something to that effect? Is that right?
Is there a reason that "How is it going for this man?" is not an accepted translation? I figure that maybe it's because that would be a strange way to ask this question in English, but using literal interpretations helps me to wrap my head around the concepts because I'm not getting thrown by the word order.