"The child opens the apple juice."
Translation:Das Kind öffnet den Apfelsaft.
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(der) Saft = masc. noun; accusative case: (den) Saft
The juice is the direct object of the sentence, hence in accusative case.
They explain the grammer and such in the discussion areas. I'm still trying to grasp it myself. It's one of those things that only comes with practice.
The hint says das apfelsaft
No, it doesn't. There is no hint that says das apfelsaft.
There is a hint for "the" which has das, Das, den (among other things) and a hint for "apple juice" which has Apfelsaft (with capital A).
Those let you construct den Apfelsaft, which is correct.
You cannot always take the topmost hint. Duolingo is a stupid machine which doesn't understand English or German and doesn't know which "the" in "the child opens the apple juice" goes with das and which "the" goes with den -- but learners are hopefully smarter than Duolingo.
Im pretty sure that algorithms should be able to distinguish cases, and not havijg the program do that is lazy on the part of the devs who are collecting all that sweet ad revenue - and should not be the burden of the consumer.
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You might say "Den Apfelsaft öffnet das Kind" in specific contexts (verb 2nd, as Erin rightly said, but object and subject switched places). This would put the emphasis on "den Apfelsaft" and make it "this particular [bottle of] apple juice": All the bottles are opened by [whomever], but this particular bottle over there will be opened by the child.
Verb is almost always 2nd position in a sentence (Dative words send it to the end) if I remember correctly
Why in hell Duo gives Das as first hint?
Because "the child" in German is das Kind.
It has to give some hint first -- it can't put both das and den in the same position.
So you might have das first and den second, or den first and das second.
Since you know that Kind is neuter and Apfelsaft is masculine, you can easily know that "the child" has to be das Kind and "the apple juice" as the direct object (in the accusative case) has to be den Apfelsaft, enabling you to choose the correct hint -- by using your knowledge of German rather than by taking a wild guess and blindly taking the topmost hint.
Right because I know that Kind is neuter and Apfelsaft is masculine I don't understand why putting 'Das' as hint for the article of Apfelsaft, anyway thank you for your answer.
The hints are like dictionary entries.
"the" can be translated into German as der, die, das, des, dem, den depending on the context -- so you may see any of them in the hints.
The hints usually show up to three translations. Not all of them may make sense in the context of the current sentence.
The system tries to sort them so that the more reasonable ones are closer to the top, but you can't rely on the topmost one being the correct one for that position -- Duo gets confused easily.
As long as the correct hint is somewhere in the list, it's working as intended.