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So I learn German on Duolingo.

I came across this sentence: I sleep in the car during break

I enter as translation: Ich schlafe im Auto in meiner Pause, but Duo flags it as a wrong statement.

Duo shows this translation instead: Ich schlafe in meiner Pause im Auto.

I want to understand if my answer is truly wrong. If so, why/how?

I thought the German language cares less about word order!

Joker
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  • P.S: Duolingo forum on this sentence don't help much. – Joker Mar 02 '22 at 00:10
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    Duolingo does the same alse at least in Russian and English. It rejects some perfectly valid word orders. – fraxinus Mar 02 '22 at 14:47
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    Duolingo is well known for being rather rigid with respect to the answers it expects. Questioning this is futile. – Tilman Schmidt Mar 02 '22 at 17:35
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    What's normally taught is "Order of adverbials is 'time, manner, place'". This is a rule of thumb in German, but not a strict rule. – tofro Mar 02 '22 at 18:29
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    For me both options do not really translate to the original English sentence, because it is not stated that it is "my" break (same as for car, it is not specified if it is my car) and "during" should be "während". So I would say "Während der Pause schlafe ich im Auto" – HectorLector Mar 02 '22 at 20:03
  • @tofro it can't be a strict rule because "in" isn't specially marked for either of those Adverbarten. Semantics necessarily underspecifies. – vectory Mar 03 '22 at 04:57

4 Answers4

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The word order

Ich schlafe im Auto in meiner Pause.

sounds odd to me as a native speaker. The reason is that if time and place are placed after the verb, time comes first. This rule applies if there are not any reasons for a different word order, like importance or emphasis. This is just the opposite of English, where place comes before time.

RHa
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    The simplest sequence seems to be: In meiner Pause schlafe ich im Auto. – guidot Mar 02 '22 at 10:49
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    (I'm also a native speaker, and I would mostly agree with what your first sentence says - it sounds a bit odd, but not really wrong ... emphasis wouldn't really change much, at least in Austria you would emphasize by stressing the "im Auto" part, not by changing the word order) – xLeitix Mar 02 '22 at 12:33
  • @xLeitix "Ich schlafe im Auto (nur) in meiner Pause". – Karl Mar 02 '22 at 22:12
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Your sentence

Ich schlafe im Auto in meiner Pause.

is totally fine.

I really don't know, why Duolingo would flag it as wrong. You're right: there is nothing wrong with your word order since German is quite flexible with it.

Since some people called my answer wrong I want to elaborate a little:

There is a rule of thumb (as @RDBury stated in a comment). The TeKaMoLo/wann,warum,wie,wo rule (when - why - how - where). That's something to give a beginner orientation about what order would be right (or better: common) in most cases. Maybe Duolingo wanted you to follow this rule?

Usually you would deliberately trespass against it and put something in first (or sometimes even last position) for emphasis.

But consider the following dialog:

A and B meet at work in the morning.

A: Das Baby hat mich die ganze Nacht wach gehalten. Ich habe überhaupt nicht geschlafen.
The baby held me awake all night. I didn't sleep at all.

B: Ach du ...! Wie willst du denn 8 Stunden Arbeit durchstehen?
Damn! How do you want to get through 8 hours of work?

A: Ich schlafe im Auto in meiner Pause.

This is perfectly fine. There is no need to emphasize anything - neither place nor time. Maybe place came to A's mind first and then he wanted to add that he will sleep in his breaktime ... or whatever. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this sentence and it's not about emphasis.

Especially as a beginner: don't let people frustrate you by telling you that something is wrong with your grammar or your style or something because you didn't follow a (as @RDBury called it) paper rule! Language is for communication. You want other people to understand you, right!? In this case everyone will understand your sentence without any doubt.

If you ask me (as a native speaker) there is absolutely nothing wrong with your sentence - neither regarding grammar nor regarding style.

Olafant
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    I suspect that Duo is going by the TeKaMoLo/wann,warum,wie,wo rule. It's a popular rule in beginner to intermediate level German courses, but as you said, deviating from it would rarely be actually wrong. As a beginner, it's not a bad rule to start with until you learn how changes to word order affect emphasis. Unfortunately German courses don't always treat it like the "paper" rule that it actually is. – RDBury Mar 02 '22 at 05:43
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    This answer is wrong, see my answer. – RHa Mar 02 '22 at 07:40
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    @RHa You're wrong. What you call a rule (time before place) is nothing but a rule of thumb. – Olafant Mar 02 '22 at 07:47
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    @Olafant it's not an absolute rule but it is incorrect to ignore it without reason. – RHa Mar 02 '22 at 07:50
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    @RHa OP's sentence is perfectly fine. There is no rule that would make it incorrect. – Olafant Mar 02 '22 at 07:52
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    @Olafant The rule that would make it incorrect is the one that RHa referred to. Like RDBury and RHa explained, this rule can be broken for emphasis, which explains the only situation in which OP's sentence sounds fine to me: "Wo schläfst du in deiner Pause?" "Ich schlafe im Auto in meiner Pause". Without context, though, it sounds odd and out of place. – Numeri Mar 02 '22 at 07:55
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    @Numeri Doesn't sound odd or out of place for my native ears. The only rule is V2. Regarding the rule of thumb that RHa referres to: "... deviating from it would rarely be actually wrong ..." as RDBury states. – Olafant Mar 02 '22 at 08:15
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    It's obviously two different questions whether the answer it wrong as a German sentence or whether it's wrong as an answer to a specific duolingo exercise. The exercise could be about the standard order of prepositionals. – HalvarF Mar 02 '22 at 08:53
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    As a native speaker I would never say Ich schlafe im Auto in meiner Pause and I would never think you are not a native speaker by saying it that way - as confusing as it might be. Saying it in that order myself does not sound "flüssig", but it does not really sound entirely wrong. – Yanick Salzmann Mar 02 '22 at 21:30
  • @RDBury If you deviate from the rule, you change the meaning. In this case, the back-translation would be "i only sleep in my car during breaks". Perhaps because you have a driver and could sleep in the car for the whole ride. – Karl Mar 02 '22 at 22:24
  • @Karl: I think it would be more a change of emphasis than a change in meaning, but I take your point. The changes caused by a deviation from the rule can be difficult to explain, and word order choice for native speakers seems to be more a matter of intuition than logic. So I can see why teaching a relatively easy rule like this would be helpful for learners until they can develop their own intuition. The problem is that teachers don't always explain that it's more of guideline than a rule, and then students get confused when they see that native speakers don't always follow it. – RDBury Mar 03 '22 at 00:10
  • No, that’s colloquial at best. “Ich schlafe während meiner Pause im Auto.” is what I’d translate this as. – mirabilos Mar 03 '22 at 00:30
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    Wie so häufig wird hier mehrfach behauptet, die Wortreihenfolge sei eine Frage der Betonung, dabei kann man bei gegebener Wortreihenfolge unterschiedlichste Satzteile betonen. Ihr müsst versuchen Eure These zu widerlegen um nicht in ein Confirmation Bias zu stolpern! Und eine größere, empirische Häufigkeit ist noch keine Richtlinie. – user unknown Mar 03 '22 at 11:58
  • @RDBury But it's not a guideline, its a solid rule. That you can bend in the spoken language, because there you make the meaning clear by vocally emphasising some parts. We all do that, also in English. Grammar is a lot more flexible in the oral form. – Karl Mar 03 '22 at 19:01
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    @Karl: Emanuel's answer to this question pretty much summarizes my understanding of the issue. – RDBury Mar 04 '22 at 00:00
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Shouldn't Duolingo accept this answer?

There is a marked difference between "is this valid German" and "Should Duolingo accept this answer?". Duolingo teaches patterns and templates, which are rigidly defined due to Duolingo being a software implementation. Even if a sentence is perfectly valid German, Duolingo expects the user to use specific words in a specific order.

So yes, as a human learning German, your sentence is perfectly fine. But as a Duolingo user answering a lesson, your sentence does not contain the structure that the software is programmed to accept. Thankfully Duolingo is mostly consistent regarding the sentence structure and words, so after some time you will learn to give the answers that it expects.

dotancohen
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When I was taking German lessons in school, our teacher had shown us a simple in order to be sure about the sequence of every sentence. The rule is ZAO, which means that first we should consider about Zeit, after that we should consider about Art and then about Ort. So, based on this I think that the sentence right written is:

Ich schlafe in meiner Pause (Zeit) im Auto (Ort).

or it seems also fine to say:

In meiner Pause schlafe ich im Auto.

wajaap
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