"Det er ikke altid dejligt når folk rører ved én."
Translation:It is not always nice when people touch you.
17 Comments
Touching oneself and people touching you are very different. If it was "you" instead of "oneself" shouldn't it be "mig" at the end instead of "én"?
"Det er ikke altid dejligt, når folk rører ved mig" would mean that it's not nice for me specifically, when people touch me, but I assume it might always be nice for other people when people touch them. "Det er ikke altid dejligt, når folk rører ved én" proposes as a general principle that it's not always nice when people touch you.
I can see this could be a problem for non-native English speakers.
We native English speakers don't use "one" very much any more, but use "you" to indicate "one" in general.
So a correct translation here would be " it's not always nice when people touch one" (not "oneself"), but you could only imagine the Queen saying this (she uses "one" when referring to herself).
So the normal way of saying this nowadays is "it's not always nice when people touch you" (not "me" because that's too specific) - it's a bit clumsy, but saying "one" sounds strange to us, so this is how we get round it.
I notice that "en" is printed as én. I have a Danish keyboard on my computer and it doesn't include this é. So far I have only come across it in one other word "idéen". Is it used very often and why isn't included on the Microsoft Danish keyboard or on the Google Translate keyboard?
You can type it on a Danish keyboard by pressing the key to the left of backspace and then pressing "E".
Press the key highlighted in red and then the key highlighted in blue.
Tak. Mostly I just copy and paste but because it isn't used often I switched to the Danish keyboard and couldn't understand why it wasn't there. I still can't understand why it doesn't have its own dedicated character on the keyboard.
Using the dead key option gives you more options to the characters you can type, especially instead of using these keys for a character that isn't used very often. By taking up just 2 extra keys you can type: áéíóúý, àèìòù, äëïöüÿ, âêîôû, ãñ. Once you get used to it, typing these characters can be done quickly and easily.
Good question. Both are grammatically correct. The differences between "røre" and "røre ved" are subtle. If I just say "Jeg rørte hende", it sounds like I just brushed her once. It emphasizes the bluntly physical phenomenon of two objects touching, perhaps by accident. If I say "Jeg rørte ved hende", it sounds more like a deliberate touch, emphasizing the psychological aspect of my feeling of touching someone or something. It is possible for two inanimate objects to "røre hinanden", but only conscious agents can "røre ved" something in a literal sense. At least it sounds odd if objects "rører ved hinanden". If you plan on touching someone for an extended period of time, you definitely want to "røre ved". At least that's my interpretation (as a native speaker) of these phrases.
This was happening to me (on other sentences) and it turned out that my network connection had died. Duolingo happily marked correct answers wrong and advanced to new questions, until I fixed the connection. Maybe something similar happened to you?
Could you also say 'Det er ikke altid dejligt når folk rører ved man'? Would there be much of a difference in meaning? Tak
That would not work because "man" can only ever be used in the nominative case. You would have to rephrase the sentence and say something like: "Det er ikke altid dejligt, når man bliver rørt ved." But that would definitely sound more awkward than the original sentence here.
