"Most people went home after the break."

Translation: De flesta gick hem efter rasten.

[svenskaholic]

I entered "De flesta människor åkte hem efter rasten", but was considered wrong.
May I know why the answer was not accepted?

[Mokvinna]

Could you please explain "de flesta"? I understand that "flesta" is the superlative of "många" in the plural, but where is "people", and what is the function of "de"?

[ion1122]

English sometimes uses adjectives as if they were nouns. For example, "take from the rich and give to the poor".

Swedish uses this construction even more than English does.

Here "de flesta" is literally "the most", but it means "most people", just as "the rich" means rich people in my earlier example.

[Mokvinna]

Tack!

[Mother]

Why is åkte hem not suitable here?

[Arnauti]

It's an accepted answer. You can use åkte hem if you want to stress the fact that they used some kind of transportation.

[Sand_from_Mars]

I suppose the performance was bad, wasn't it?

[Arnauti]

The break in a play for instance is called pausen in Swedish, whereas rasten could be at school or work. (in English you can't tell, so both are accepted, I just felt I should point it out).

[bigswedeej]

De flesta människor was not accepted. Why not?

[Scot687756]

Also a learner here but i think the "människor" here is not necessary due to the context changing the meaning of flesta to imply people.

[ion1122]

Your noun is incorrectly in the indefinite plual. If you use a noun, it would have to be in the definite plural here --namely, människorna.

But you don't need to use a noun here at all! See my earlier post on this page.

[AaronDandr]

I put "mest människor" instead of "de flesta" , why is it wrong?

[ion1122]

Aaron, when adjectives are used in Swedish before a noun, they are usually inflected. That is, they usually take a grammatical ending related to the gender and number of the noun that follows. For example, unga tjejer, stora hus.

So you can be pretty sure that in front of a plural noun like "människor", you can't just pop in a completely uninflected word like "mest" and expect it to be correct. Where is the adjective ending?

But wait, there's more. As it happens "mest" is the adverb meaning "mostly", not the adjective meaning "most". You want the adjective here, de flesta. (Note the inflection -a.)