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- Topic: German >
- "Europa steht dir offen."
26 Comments This discussion is locked.
Actually, I realize I didn't explain that very well--I should have translated the metaphor a little further. If someone says, "When you are young and have a little money (and no responsibilities), the world is your oyster," s/he means that the world is there for you to experience and enjoy, and that you should do it. (It doesn't mean that you should steal the treasure, just that you should enjoy it. I just thought I should make that clear. ;-)
I can imagine the Duolingo English sentence being used as a headline in an advertisement for tourism. Anywhere else (and probably also there) I'd consider it to be pompous and fatuous. So in that sense--it's not a good translation of the German phrase. It's not even good writing in English.
The correct word order is "offen stehen". For a door, you can use both "Die Tür steht offen" and "Die Tür ist offen" interchangeably. The construction with 'stehen' often (but not always) has a connotation of gaping while the 'sein' variant is completely neutral. For doors, gates, and the like you can savely treat them as synonymes.
The expression "Etwas steht jdm. offen" is often used figuratively, the idea being that there is an open door one just has to walk through to attain something.
In the case of the shop I'd rather say "Das Geschäft hat geöffnet". Colloquially and in some German dialects you may hear 'das Geschäft ist offen' but it doesn't sound very elegant to my ears.
2413
The hint is for steht dir which means suits you/looks good on you.
Adding offen does not make sense with this meaning, so it has to be: stands open to you.
Yes, I keep getting this wrong due to the hint not being accepted. It would also be extremely nice if commenting during a timed lesson paused the time. I know people could use it to go look up an answer or something, but mainly it just stops me commenting on problems. I have seen this one enough times though that I have decided to lose time commenting anyway (and obviously come back to edit it once the speed drill was over, since it would have used up all of my time).
133
Nope. If someone says "Europe is open to you," it does not mean that Europe now belongs to you. You may enter. You may not start rearranging the furniture and spoiling the rugs.