"He is studying French with this prayer."
Translation:Mit diesem Gebet lernt er Französisch.
27 Comments
384
Right??? If the English said he was LEARNING French, using "erlernt" would make sense, but it says STUDYING, so really, "studiert" should be accepted, because that's what you're being asked to translate!
Here's another translation they gave that completely flummoxed me: Er erlernt Französisch mit jenem Gebet.
So I looked up "erlernt" and it translates to "he learns" which one would think makes "Er" obsolete, no? It would translate to: He he learns...." And "jenem?" When did we ever learn THAT??? OMG. I should have chosen to learn French.
erlernt is not "he learns" -- it's the form you would use for "he, she, it", true, but it doesn't have the meaning of "he" (or "she" or "it") built into it.
You could also say sie erlernt... for "she learns ... (thoroughly)".
erlernen means to study something until you master it. https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/22367/erlernt-vs-gelernt Although I'm not quite sure how it fits into this sentence - I'm not convinced one can master French using a prayer.
I’m not a native speaker, but my understanding is that the verb ‘studieren’ can only be used when you refer to a formal course of study, as in “I study psychology” (to become a psychologist). If you want to use the word study in its general sense, you must stick to ‘lernen’.
- 354
From the context it's not clear if the prayer is part of his formal studies or not. Therefore, using the verb studieren should be accepted in my opinion.
- 12
Be that as it may, as JonnaSheya said, "studieren" should be acceptable since there's no context. This is a serious flaw in how they deem answers correct or not.
- 12
Nothing, just Duo's poor "context-based" evaluation that provides zero context.
Studiert should be accepted based on the construction of the English sentence. It doesn't say he is NOT in a formal course of study. Also, the rollover hints are 1) lernt and 2) studiert.
- 12
I agree - and what exactly does this sentence mean, anyway? Still not fixed, after all this time! Studieren means to study, lernen means to learn = NOT the same!
- 354
My thoughts exactly. One cannot learn a language from just one prayer. Especially if they suggest using verb erlernen (that the suggestion if you try using studiert) which apparently is supposed to mean mastering...
- 1638
Why "lernt" is accepted instead of "studiert", which seems closer to the provided English translation?
German uses what is called V2 word order, meaning "verb second", that is to say, the verb should be the second idea in a sentence. Since this sentence starts with "mit diesem Gebet", the next idea in the sentence must be the verb ("lernt") and the rest follow as normal. This is always the case when the sentence starts with a word or phrase as above.
It's also worth pointing out that the verb will always be second here, even though the other elements can be rearranged to change the emphasis:
[Mit diesem Gebet] [lernt] [er] [Französisch]
[Er] [lernt] [mit diesem Gebet] [Französisch]
[Er] [lernt] [Französisch] [mit diesem Gebet]
[Französisch] [lernt] [er] [mit diesem Gebet]
It's also worth noting that the subject (er) needs to come immediately after the verb if it's not at the beginning.
There's a good series here on word-order, how to form it, and how it changes the emphasis.
Obviously, none of this applies in subordinate clauses, where the finite verb is always in final position.
