"Wir essen Kartoffeln."
Translation:We are eating potatoes.
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1320
Google translate wants to translate "Fritten" from Luxembourgish, not from German. I can understand that they say "Fritten" in Luxembourg, because Belgium is their neighbour: "friet".
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That's right, "Fritten" is used close to the Belgian border, in the Rhineland, the Sauerland, and Saarland, for example.
1320
Why is there a need for a continuous form in English? This form does not exist in German. "Wir essen" means both "we eat" and "we are eating".
Why? Simply because they can. German "thinks" it needs a bazillion of verb forms for both subject agreement and tense, when, say, Chinese manages just fine without. We also think we need a plural, which speakers of Japanese don't have and don't miss (because if they did miss it, they'd long since have developed or borrowed it). Asking "why do they need it" doesn't really help you in language learning, and I'd go so far as to say that it probably even hinders embracing the target language. Just enjoy the fact that you just learned a new way to think, and that this or that language has opened up new categories to you, whether they be tenses you didn't know, noun classes, new phonemes, or just a neat new word. :)
1320
Why is there a need for a continuous form in English? was more or less a rhetorical question. Evan wondered how it is possible that a German sentence, which appears to be in the present simple, has been translated into the English present continuous. Every language has its own characteristics and peculiarities. And that is the fun of learning another language!
1320
I meant that German and other languages manage fine without a present continuous. One understands whether something happens now or is a habit or fact without such a "to be + verb-ing" construction, or says it in a different way.
You really can't. Unless you were given "wir essen gerade Kartoffeln" (or dialectal "wir sind am Essen"), German simply doesn't do a present continuous. This is a bit of an ongoing puzzle to me since Duolingo switched from mandatory "type in the translation" to "click on the matching tiles". Basically before I start on any given exercise, I first locate the verb and check if it is in the -ing form so I know what kind of sentence I have to construct. It seems to me the choice of the English translation is quite arbitrary; I haven't spotted any system behind when it's simple present and when it's continuous.
1320
You added an article that is not in the German sentence. It said "wir essen Kartoffeln" not "wir essen die Kartoffeln".