"We have many planes."
Translation:Wir haben viele Flugzeuge.
11 Comments
1231
Ich find's immer hilfreich, den ganzen Satz aufzuschreiben, den man reingetippt hat. Ansonsten kann man nicht feststellen, ob der Fehler woanders im Satz lag.
Wenn du den Satz „Wir haben eine Menge Flugzeuge“ als Antwort reingegeben hättest, würde ich sagen, dass da kein Fehler ist.
Aber falls du z.B. den Satz „Wir haben eine Menge Flugzeug“ versucht hättest, dann wäre da schon ein Fehler, ohne dass wir „eine Menge“ überhaupt betrachten würden.
- 1367
I think "Wir haben zahlreiche Flugzeuge" should also be excepted. right?
- 1231
I just tried that and reported it, but honestly, I don't think it's worth losing sleep over.
Yes, "zahlreich" is a synonym for "viele", but is what German speakers might call "etwas gehobener". It's a bit fancier than "viele" and almost akin to saying "We have myriad planes".
No, it isn't quite that "gehoben", but hopefully you can see now why I don't expect it to be accepted anytime soon.
I'm confused. I thought Zeugs was the plural for Zeug. So why would it not be Flugzeugs?
- 1231
No, "Zeugs" is the genitive singular of "Zeug", so you would see "Flugzeugs" appear in something like this:
Die Flügel des Flugzeugs.
The wings of the aeroplane.
The plural for "Zeug" is "Zeuge"*, and, correspondingly, the plural for "Flugzeug" is "Flugzeuge".
*Just a note that "Zeug" is an interesting word, that—although it has a plural form (which even gets used from time to time)—is often used in the singular like a plural noun; as a mass/uncountable noun. But this is an aside that's irrelevant to the point at hand, so I won't go into any detail here.
Ok, so both "viel" and "Flugzeug" are supposed to have -e added in this instance? Flugzeug does not have one syllable, shouldn't it have some other extension?
Is it perhaps a case that it's a complex word (Flugzeug [Flug+ Zeug]), so in each word it is allowed to have one syllable so that the extension in plural would be -e? Hm. Hilfe mich! ^^
You seem to be under the impression that there are hard rules on how to form the plural of nouns in German: this is not the case. There are certain tendencies, sure (to name the most common: feminine nouns tend to take -(e)n, and most masculine and neuter nouns ending in ‘-er’ or ‘-el’ don't change), but otherwise plural formation is completely arbitrary, and you will have to learn the plural forms of nouns the same way you learn their gender. That said, the plural of compound nouns is always dictated by the last noun in the compound (in this case: the plural of ‘Zeug’ is ‘Zeuge’, so the plural of ‘Flugzeug’ is ‘Flugzeuge’, and the same goes for ‘Feuerzeug’ → ‘Feuerzeuge’, ‘Spielzeug’ → ‘Spielzeuge’ and so on).
It should be noted that Zeug is generally considered to be uncountable. I read that there ACTUALLY is a plural (very rare), but in 31 years I have never heard anyone use it on its own, to be honest :D
