15 Comments
I'm getting confused as to when the article "the" is needed and when it's not needed. It seemed in the possessive lesson that "the" was understood and not necessary to translate, i.e. kvinnene elsker mennene sine, "the women love their husbands." With "har på (seg, meg, etc)" I thought "the" would be understood too. But here I answered "They are wearing suits" and was corrected to "They are wearing the suits."
Note: I'm doing this from the app and not the website so I may have missed some info. Duo, it'd be nice if you included the informational pieces at the beginning of lessons on the website in the app too
"They are wearing suits" = De har paa seg dresser. (not 100% sure that this is the correct plural.)
"They are wearing the suits." De har paa seg dressene.
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Usually I can tell them apart, but in this sentence the slow audio is clearly de, and the fast audio is clearly vi.
Analyzing the sentense, how do I know in advance that "They are wearing suits" is incorrect?
You know "suits" is incorrect because "dressene" is the definite plural, hence you have to say "the suits".
While I think we can all agree that you must translate this as "They wear THE suits" (or "they are wearing THE suits"), that sounds very awkward in English. For one thing, it sort of implies that each of them is wearing multiple suits. Or that somehow they are collectively wearing a groups of suits. 99% of the time we would say "They are wearing suits", meaning that each of them is wearing A (singular) suit. So the question is: Is the Norwegian sentence here typical of how a Norwegian would say it? i.e. would they tend to use a definite article, as in "THE suits", and which of the meanings here are they trying to convey?
Because "dressene" is the definite plural form.
dresser = suits
dressene = the suits
