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- "Kolik procent Němců kouří?"
9 Comments
I translated it as 'What percentage of Germans smokes?' - as in "the percentage" = "it" = smokes. The answer was denied suggesting smoke instead of smokes. Doesn't seem right to me.
In case of sentences with words that indicate parts/portions (percentages, fractions, some...), you need to look at the noun after "of". Germans is plural, so it will be "smoke". However, this course is about teaching Czech, not English...
1925
S tím učením češtiny a ne angličtiny, to není až tak pravda. Je tady spousta Čechů, kteří se učí anglicky.
I guess I didn't think people would do that. Good point. Anyhow, I still stick to my opinion about the focus of the course. If I wanted my English grammar picked at and corrected, I would take an English course. Instead, I am trying to learn Czech. Czech is hard enough to comprehend on its own. Also considering that many people who take this course are not native English speakers, it could be nice to get a correction/warning in case of English grammar error instead of marking the whole answer wrong. I understood the meaning of the Czech sentence and translated it correctly. That was the point of the question. The part where I wrote smoke or smokes is really so irrelevant to my learning of Czech nations and the use of Czech word 'procent'.
I agree. The percentage is still a plurality, and thus the verb is to be conjugated in the plural, not the singular.
- 187
As a native English speaker, there are times when I would construe "percentage" as singular. For example, "Is the percentage of Germans who smoke higher than the percentage of Frenchmen?"
On the other hand, in the sentence here I would say "percent" rather than "percentage". After all, it is not the "percentage" that smokes, for the percentage is only an abstract number. What you are really asking here is "How many per hundred (percent) of Germans smoke."
As others have said, native/near-native English speakers would not say "how many percent/percentage" but would use "what percent/percentage instead." Since I had the word bank up for this, I couldn't get it wrong... but that would be very easy to do using the keyboard for translation.
I understand the point of learning the Czech phrasing, and appreciate knowing it now. But the English sentence is just wrong..
"How many percent of Germans smoke" is simply wrong. It's a direct translation from Czech. In English we start with "What percentage of Germans" and then some people would say "smoke" while others would say "smokes", depending on the dialect.
'What percentage of...' is correct usage and should be an accepted answer. I have never heard a native English speaking person use 'how many percent of...'. It is simply wrong, and as pointed out immediately above, a direct translation of the Czech.
