"Kinder, warum blutet ihr?"
Translation:Children, why are you bleeding?
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A potential answer might be, “we were fighting,” or “we fell off the sled,” or similar. Doesn’t have to be a large number of kids— two is enough
It's the guy's totally couldn't care less voice asking this question that cracks me up!
Even if they could potentially be buying something from you? I'm from the US and I've been called, "sir" by shop workers since I was 10. Because they knew I had cash money.
That's not how it is in most of Europe. In most of Europe, even in formal situations, children would be talked to using informal you. That's usually not out of disrespect, and most of children would be quite weirded out if you start using "formal you" with them.
I think the first time a stranger used formal you with me was when I was around 17.
In the formal address, singular and plural would both be "Warum bluten Sie?".
But as quis_lib_duo pointed out - and interestingly got downvoted for - addressing children in the formal way is not something anyone would do, neither with their own children nor when they're strangers. As long as you call those persons "children", you use the informal address; once you think they're more adults than children, you'll start to use the formal address (if they're strangers) and stop calling them "children". If they're your own children, you can keep calling them "Kinder" for the rest of their lives, but being family, they would be addressed in the informal way.
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Guys what are all this comments? Kinder warum blutet ihr, also means - Kids, why do you bleed? - which is accepted I just imagined teacher in primary school asking his pupils that question. So no mystery, no Hansel and Gretel story, just normal question.
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Why no mystery?
Perhaps the children have been involved in some kind of international espionage, and they are hot on the trail of a rival spy. The threat to national security is too great to give up and go play. But they also can't tell Mom, for her own safety.
They have to convince her that everything's fine. They have to lie. But the lies are stacking up, teetering precariously, threatening to undo everything they've accomplished. They are so tired of lying. So tired. They'd like to nap. They'd like to crawl into their beds and let somebody else handle it. They want to let the adults save the world this time. But they can't. They have to finish what they started.
"We fell down on the playground," they say to their mother. "We simply fell. Nothing more. We certainly didn't escape from the clutches of a foreign intelligence service, make a daring getaway through the streets of Istanbul, leap from a bridge onto a speeding train, and evade detection at the border, only to find that our own handler had turned on us. It's not like we've been up all night interrogating a turncoat in the basement. It's just an ordinary playground accident. Obviously!"
Their mother leaves, but a skeptical look lingers on her face.
The children wait until nightfall.
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Joey psssssssssssssst..... Mossad told me to be quiet about it, and you're just giving informations like that :O Who do you really work for... KGB, CIA, MI...
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You, Sir, get a Lingot for this comment. Which will self-destruct in five seconds...
This conversation never happened.
Why is y'all not an acceptable form of the second person plural pronoun? It makes it less ambiguous.
I'm from Liverpool, but I don't feel Duolingo needs to include the Scouse second person plural 'yous' (pronounced 'yiz') as an option.
While common, "y'all" isn't really standard English.
And actually, "y'all" sounds a little odd to me when used with children. You'd have to be really dedicated to using "y'all" to use it in this context.
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You're not wrong, but "y'all" should be more widely accepted than it is, and it's more widely used than one would suspect. I'm a proud supporter of "y'all". Tons of other languages have a "y'all", including German and Texan. I have a Canadian friend who added "y'all" to his vocabulary after studying Greek and finding "you" to be insufficient information while translating. Y'all should all say "y'all", y'all.
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I am Texan and I despise this contraction, but partially because none can seem to spell it properly. They often place the apostrophe after the A, which ergibt keinen Sinn.
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I agree - 'y'all' has a very laid-back tone. If children are bleeding, there should be some alarm involved.
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“If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?"
"The villany you teach me, I will execute, and it will go hard but I will better the instruction" Maybe. Tough talk. But I prefer "The quality of mercy is not strained". The world needs more of that.
A bit long in the tooth, this series of comments. Please weed out the inane and superfluous, The cogent remarks are right on, but there's much meandering. Some of us, relying on the high deserved Duo reputation, read through all of the printed comments. Rarely does it feel inordinately extended. But ....
weil wir unsere spanisch unterricht verpasst haben, und der verrückte grüne Eule hat uns einen kleinen Besuch abgestattet.
After all of these threads, I understand the issue of the plural pronoun, but why isn't the verb plural? Is it just that the plural "ihr" doesn't take a plural verb? Is "...bluten ihr" something that cannot happen?
I often get careless and forget to use a plural verb, but this time I thought I had it right.
Actually, it is plural— second person plural. “Ihr” takes verbs with a ‘t’ ending. Sometimes, the “ihr” form is the same as the 3rd-person-singular er/sie/es form— but that’s not always the case.
So, best not to think of 2nd-person-plural as “not plural” because it really is. It’s just that for some verbs, the ‘ihr’ form and the ‘er, sie, es’ form fall together.
Sometimes, with a few verbs, the “ihr” form happens to be the same as the 3rd-person-singular er/sie/es form— but that’s not generally the case.
Most verbs are like this, actually; it's only some irregular verbs that don't have identical forms for "er/sie/es" and "ihr."
Thanks! Yes, that's true -- I was thinking of nehmen, sprechen, laufen, and others where the two forms are different. I will edit my earlier comment accordingly.
To expand on what 2GreyCats said already, I would advise not thinking of German verb forms as "singular" vs. "plural" because they just don't really fall nicely into those categories.
The full conjugation of "bluten" (which conjugates the same as most verbs) is: ich blute / du blutest / er,sie,es blutet // wir bluten / ihr blutet / sie,Sie bluten. As you can see, there is not a consistent "singular" verb form or a consistent "plural" verb form.