- Forum >
- Topic: German >
- "Ich schwimme in Milch."
66 Comments
1601
Spoke to a German friend at dinner who says 'I am swimming in milk' is the proper translation and means you have lots of milk - a valid literal translation of the English idiom.
I imagine somebody won lottery price of a thousand gallon of milk. Literally drown with milk.
In English "I am swimming in X" means "I have a lot of X" perhaps it is the same in Deutsch?
Is this equivalent to answering a question by saying you have so much of something you are swimming in it? In English if I was a farmer and had an amazing harvest someone could ask me "How many turnips do you have?!" and I could respond "Dude, I'm swimming in Turnips" or "I'm swimming in them".
was wondering this also. if so, I'm swimming in milk should be the primary translation rather than I swim in milk.
Haha! This is funny because your comment to the parent comment suggests that you really like milk, but on it's own this sentence would make no sense whatsoever! Funny how that works, huh?
Consider Charlie and chocolate factory. Willy Wonka takes the kids to this chocolate section where there is a huge milk tank. One of the kid falls into it while doing some mischief, and shouts the above statement.
- 456
while everyone else is talking about swimming in milk, may I ask is this accusative or dative?
im implies the Dative, as it's a contraction of in dem, which is the Dative form of der and das
Also, the person speaking in the sentence (Duo?) is swimming in the milk, not swimming to it (do you understand what I mean?); that's Dative
It's an exaggeration. I swim in milk = I have tons of milk. It's very useful since you can swap out "milk" with anything else. For example, "Ich schwimme im Geld"; if you're rich and willing to brag.
I find it interesting that people immediately assume milk comes from farms/cows. As a mother, I can say that I would use that phrase metaphorically and quite commonly in the early days post partum. Very glad to hear that the idiom is the same across both languages.
- 217
Someone made a sarcastic comment about "reindeers drinking milk" on the Swedish course so I pointed out that most mammals tend to start with milk and they deleted their comment :)
Is this some kind of a metaphor or something (and not just one of Duolingo's strange sentences) ? I'm guessing that it could meant filthy rich or something...
Baby Hans: Speaking to baby Fredric "Yo, your father is a polygamist? Wow you must get lots of floppy drink compartments eh?"
Baby Fredric: In response "Ja, Ich schwimme in Milch."
Possible use?
So we learned during these lessons that flying creatures drink beer and germans swim in milk! What a strange world!! What I really learned here is that "in the milk" seems not be a correct english translation, however I would prefer harder german excercises than these nonsense sentences!
