"What do the five men read?"
Translation:Was lesen die fünf Männer ?
March 27, 2013
12 Comments
Was lesen die fünf Mensch is wrong, but i thought that men translates as Mensch too. why not in this sentence.
October 17, 2013
OK, I see. There are two issues here
- "Mensch" means "man" in the sense of "human being". I think the plural 'men' is not normally used with that meaning in English.You'd rather resort to "five people". [Not a native English speaker, though]
- 'men' is plural, so it'd have to be "die fünf Menschen" in German
October 17, 2013
slacker822
971
Can I write "Die fünf Männer lesen was?"? It wasn't accepted, but I thought that word order was also correct...
February 4, 2014
Better stick to "Was lesen die fünf Männer?". If you put the "was" to the end, it conveys a sense of incredulity that isn't present in the original. Similar to "The five men are reading WHAT?"
Interrogative pronouns should normally be placed at the beginning of the sentence.
February 4, 2014
Why can't I say "Was lesen sie die fünf Männer?" with the pronoun after the conjugated verb? You can do this in many other languages; does it just not work like that in German?
June 28, 2014
