Um.

[ysobel]

So I am refreshing my German using Duolingo -- 146 day streak woo -- and one of the words today was Ernst, meaning seriousness. One of the sentences I encountered three times with this word; the first time was the “refrigerator magnet” sort of thing where you have a list of words that you pick out the correctly translated sentence from.

The German sentence was “Im Ernst” -- and there is no punctuation in Duo but the vocal inflection was as a question. Literally, this translates to “in the seriousness”

The only possible English translation from the provided words, and apparently the default translation for that sentence, is “No kidding”.

Seriously, Duo? Seriously?

Comments

[yvi]

Whut?

Seriously? ;-)

(I actually mostly say "seriously?" But that's because I used to watch too much Grey's Anatomy)

[vass]

/o\ I hear you. Yes, English-speakers DO say "cosmetics", not just "make-up", that is a thing! Also, while I'm complaining: British/Australian spellings are not wrong! I am not adding "u" to words to be fancy or because I don't know how they're spelled!

[kaberett]

Huh, my literal translation for that would probably be "in earnest", but in any case, NOT IMPRESS, DUOLINGO.

[trelana]

I gave up on DuoLingo early, when it told me 'el gato come la manzana.' Sorry, but I have cats, and never once have they come within a million miles of eating an apple. I get that they're trying to teach sentence construction, word comprehension, word gendering, and etc, but that sentence is just so *wrong* it annoyed me into quitting on the app, heh.

[yvi]

Depends on the context, but I wouldn't use "im Ernst" as anything but a question. For everything else, the adjective is much more natural.

As a question, when flabbergasted by something it's "seriously?"

When talking about someone saying something "in earnest" you'd just use the adjective "ernst".