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- "The teachers are missing the…
"The teachers are missing the flight."
Translation:Die Lehrer verpassen den Flug.
24 Comments
- fehlen: something is missing. Bei diesem Puzzle fehlen zwei Teile. "Two pieces are missing from this puzzle." Ihm fehlt ein Bein. "One of his legs is missing." Du fehlst mir. "I miss you."
- verfehlen: to fail to hit a target. Zwei seiner Pfeile haben das Ziel verfehlt. "Two of his arrows missed the target."
- verpassen: to fail to take advantage of (a mode of transport or an event), especially by being late: Du hast das Mittagessen verpasst, weil du den Zug verpasst hast. "You missed lunch because you missed the train."
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Interesting; so I guess Google Translate is wrong, then; they suggested
Den Lehrern fehlt der Flug.
Is such a suggestion outright wrong, or merely not advised?
Den Lehrern fehlt der Flug means "The teachers miss the flight" in the sense of "The teachers are a bit sad and have a feeling of longing because the flight is not there".
It does not mean "The teachers arrived too late and could not catch the plane any more because it had departed already."
So... for a machine that knows nothing about the world works and what meaning "miss" has in connection with "flight", it's a reasonable suggestion. For a human that does have knowledge about the world, it's a rather silly translation.
vermissen is to miss someone who has gone away (“miss you! - miss you too!” kind of thing).
Not for missing a target or missing a bus.
verpassen is stressed on the stem (verPASSen) and so the prefix is not separable.
In fact, ver- is never a separable prefix -- it never takes the stress.
Only stressed prefixes are separable, e.g. ANschauen > ich schaue an.
"Die Lehrerinnen verpassen den Flug" is not accepted.
Really? That would surprise me -- that's one of the accepted translations.
Do you have a screenshot of that answer being rejected? Please upload it to a website somewhere (e.g. imgur) and tell us the URL.
unfortunately i didn't take the screenshot but had reported my answer.
I don't see any reports from the past day.
It's possible that another contributor deleted it or that you reported a variation which was wrong (a typo, for example) and had previously been permanently rejected.
No, I do remember the exact case. I had first reported it & then posted about it here.
Can you be more specific in your question, please?
What was your entire answer?
So, for the reasons above, "Die Lehrerinnen fehlen den Flug." is wrong?
Yes, it's wrong.
Then why does the program suggest fehlen as the primary choice if it isn't even a possible correct answer?
why does the program suggest
The hints don't "suggest". You can't blindly take the topmost hint as an "answer" or "suggestion".
Generally, Duo tries to order hints so that the topmost ones are the most relevant, but it can easily get confused.
That said, I see a hint for verpassen attached to "are missing", so I would have expected that to be shown near the top.
Wasn't it? Can you please show a screenshot of the hints in the order that you see them? (Upload it to a website somewhere, e.g. imgur, and tell us the URL to the image.)
if it isn't even a possible correct answer?
The hints are a bit like dictionary definitions -- words can often have multiple meanings, of which only one or two might make sense in a given sentence. So the hints can have translations that work in other sentences but not this one.
For example, "The batteries are missing." would translate to Die Batterien fehlen. because here, "are missing" means "are not present; are gone" rather than "have failed to catch (the bus)".
