Clause Order

Mar 21, 2023 15:46

I'm back with another question. This time, my query is about clause order in Duolingo land ( Read more... )

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schnee March 22 2023, 06:32:05 UTC
It's not wrong - Duolingo's wrong when it says it's wrong.

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mikazo March 22 2023, 20:24:02 UTC
Does the German sentence sound natural to you? The English translation it offers sounds kind of weird. For instance, would it be common to say "stimmst du mir zu?" Or, nominalizing a verb in this context without articles ("Lesen" instead of "Das Lesen"), versus for example, "Es ist aufregender zu lesen als fernzusehen." I'm just curious.

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schnee March 23 2023, 07:56:18 UTC
The German sentence sounds entirely natural to me, yeah. So do the English ones, but I'll defer to your expertise as a native speaker there. :)

Whether it'd be common to phrase it this way in German I can't say - I don't think I I would do so, but that's not saying much. That said, the thing I personally probably wouldn't say is … stimmst du mir zu?; I'd say … oder? or … findest du nicht auch? or so instead. This is probably just personal preference.

Nominalizing verbs without articles is common in any case: Fahrradfahren ist gut für die Gesundheit, Rauchen nicht, or nur Fliegen ist schöner, or Forschen fällt mir leichter als Schreiben, and so on.

You can also say es ist aufregender zu lesen als fernzusehen, yes. That's more formal and more likely (I imagine) to be found in written German; Lesen ist aufregender als Fernsehen is more colloquial and more likely to be heard in spoken German.

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dandelion March 22 2023, 21:51:59 UTC
Either would be fine - though technically both of the English versions have a comma splice. Sometimes Duolingo is limited by the variety of options its question setters have inputted, rather than because alternatives are incorrect.

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