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- Correct translation of 'I am …
Correct translation of 'I am going' in German.
I frequently use Google translate to find the translation of basic english conversations. I was confused to find the following translation of 'I am going' on Google translate. It showed the translation of "I am going" to be " ich würde, ich möchte".
I tried searching for that on the web but to no avail. Is this translation correct? If yes then how? I really appreciate some help here. Thanks!
8 Comments
46
I frequently use Google translate to find the translation of basic english conversations.
This is a bad idea.
It showed the translation of "I am going" to be " ich würde, ich möchte".
This is why it's a bad idea -- those translations are incorrect. "Ich würde" translates to "I would", and "ich möchte" to "I would like to".
Google Translate can be useful for getting the vague gist of a text in a language that you don't know at all, but it's far too unreliable for actually learning a foreign language.
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I think Google got confused about different uses of 'I am going' there - I am on the way to somewhere and the 'going to' future. Those modal verbs could be used for talking about future plans. If you put the options a dictionary (or googletranslate) offers you back in to translate the other way, you can often get a clearer idea of the intention. Or translate English synonyms and look for common answers. Nothing beats a good dictionary. Googletranslate is actually quite handy for some things but you need to be careful with it,
22
I am going. = Ich gehe. (which also means "I go.")
But if that's not the complete sentence and you want to say "I am going to do something.", which is the same as "I will do something.", you can say Ich werde etwas tun. Though this future tense construction can be replaced with present tense, especially if you have a time marker which indicates the action being done in the future. So "I am going to do that tomorrow." would be Ich mache das morgen. So if that "I am going" sentence isn't complete, we'll have to know the rest of it in order to properly translate it :)
"entweder gehst du oder ich gehe" means either you go or I go but what about 'I am going' if "ich gehe" means I go