"The man suddenly feels sick."
Translation:Dem Mann wird plötzlich schlecht.
6 Comments
Hi, how often do native German speakers start a sentence with the 3rd or 4th fall in the first place?
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It does sometimes happen that we put the (grammatical) object (3rd/4th case) first:
The thing about the sentence "Dem Mann wird plötzlich schlecht" - I'm sure there's language experts here who can explain this better - is that there's a hidden "es" in there which is, grammatically speaking, the actual "subject" of the sentence: "Dem Mann wird es schlecht." It's the same construction as "Es geht mir gut".
Similarly: "Mir fehlen 10€." - same as in English ("I lack/miss 10 €"), you'll put the thing that feels like the rightful subject of the sentence first. Sorry, I can't explain it any better. :) (Edit: I just realised there's a hidden "es" in there as well: "Es fehlen mir 10€.") If you say "10€ fehlen mir" (subject-verb-object), you put an emphasis on the fact that it's 10€ (not 5€) - it's not the word order you would normally use.
Those examples, though, are really just about the way German language just works in certain instances. Other than that, in "normal" sentences we sometimes put the object first when it was mentioned in the previous sentence and we want to put some emphasis on it: "In that house you will find a man. To the man you will give this letter." Or: "You wash the apple and you peel the banana. The apple you then cut into cubes and the banana into slices."
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"Dem Mann wird schlecht" tends to mean that he's about to throw up, or at least he has to feel queazy/nauseous in some way (digestion-wise, or also close to fainting).
"Der Mann fühlt sich krank" means that he e.g. feels like he has contracted the flu, he just doesn't feel well, he might ache all over and have a fever. It can't mean that he's about to throw up. "He's feeling ill."
I'm not sure how exactly the word "sick" would be used in English, but if you normally would understand "He feels sick" as (potentially) "He feels he's caught an infection (or similar)", then "Er fühlt sich plötzlich krank" should be fine.
