"Duo's best friend is a duck."
Translation:Der beste Freund von Duo ist eine Ente.
How about "Der beste Freund Duos ist eine Ente." (i.e. using the genitive construct)
I was thinking the same thing: how do you do genitive without the definite article? Is it more common to use von in this case? Only for a person (von Duo)?
I suppose it isn't common to have a possessive for an indefinite object, and therefore it would almost always be 'the s.th. of THE object' or else a named individual 'the s.th. of Bob'. But it is grammatically possible to say, for example, 'the eye of A storm'. How would one say that in German? 'das Auge eines Sturms'? 'das Auge von einem Sturm'?
das Auge eines Sturm(e)s and das Auge von einem Sturm are both possible.
Possessives for people's names are often formed by adding an -s: Tinas Schiff, Julias Buch, Peters Heft, Jakobs Apfel.
(Things are tricky if the name already ends in -s: Hans' Buch, Hansens Buch, Hanses Buch all sound bad to me.)
If the gender is important, you can use adjectives, the way you might say "male turtle" or "female turtle" in English: männlicher Hund, weiblicher Hund or männliche Katze, weibliche Katze.
Some animals also have specific words for the male or female, as with Kater for "tomcat (male cat)", Erpel or Enterich for "drake (male duck)", Rüde for "male dog", or Hündin for "female dog".
Superlatives are pretty much always definite in German, since they (at least in theory) uniquely identify a particular individual.
So they are usually preceded by the definite article (or a possessive).
Just as in English we wouldn't say "Tom is tallest boy in the class" or "Best friend of Duo came to visit".
So, I know that in German, the verb has to be in the first, second or last position (except subordinate clauses), I also know "position" doesn't mean "word" necessarily, but how would you divide this sentence (which has no subordinate clause), so that the verb (ist) is considered to be in any of the three possible positions? To me the only possibility seems to be that the sentence is divided like so: "Der beste Freund"-"von Duo"-"ist eine Ente" and the verb is therefore in the last position. Can anyone confirm or correct me?
Conjunctions can determine the position of the verb because a subordinating conjunction such as dass or weil requires the verb to go to the end, for example.
And putting anything before a verb in a main clause will require the verb to come next so that it is the second thing in the sentence -- this anything can be not only a noun phrase but also, for example, an adverb: Heute esse ich Brot "I am eating bread today".
What was the entire sentence that you entered?
Perhaps it was trying to tell you that instead of the nominative case Duo, you should have entered the genitive form Duos in German, e.g. if you had written Duo bester Freund instead of Duos bester Freund.
Though I agree that the error message is misleading.
Possessives for names in German (usually) don't use an apostrophe; you simply add an "s": "Duos." (The exception is if the name already ends in "s," in which case you add an apostrophe and nothing else: "Hans" -> "Hans' .")
Also, since there's not an article like "der" before it, "beste" should be "bester," with the masculine nominative ending "-er."
Finally, "Freunde" is plural ("friends"). You need the singular, for "friend," which is just "Freund."
So "Duos bester Freund ist eine Ente."
Ah, I thought you might have meant that, but you put in an apostrophe. :)
German forms the possessive for proper names without an apostrophe. So "Duos" in German means the same as "Duo's" in English-- i.e., "belonging to Duo" or "of Duo."
(Though if the name happens to end in "-s" already, you use an apostrophe with no extra "-s": "Hans' " = "belonging to Hans.")
Unfortunately Duo's dictionary is not quite smart enough to find the correct conjugation for a word in context; the drop-down list of translations is not specific to the particular exercise you're on. In other words, it will give you possible translations for a word, but you have to figure out the right one and conjugate it yourself.
You can use either "Duos bester Freund ist eine Ente" or "Duos beste Freundin ist eine Ente" (as well as some other variations with other structures). "Freunde" is plural "friends," so your translation reads "Duo's best friends is a duck."
Why is it not "der bester Freund" rather than beste?
Take your pick of explanation:
1) der already has the -r ending which shows masculine nominative, so the adjective doesn't have to show this fact as well and therefore can take a generic -e ending
2) After a definite article such as der, adjectives take weak inflection, which for masculine nominative is -e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_adjectives#Weak,_mixed,_and_strong_inflection
'The best friend of Duo, is a duck'. Should be accepted, surely?
Eh? No, why do you think so? That is an English sentence, not a German one.
If you came to this sentence discussion, you were probably asked to translate English into German.
If that was not the exercise type you had, please provide the URL to a screenshot you have uploaded to a website that shows the question, your answer, and the error message.
can anyone explain why it is 'der beste freund' without grammar lingo? I'm baffled as to how you not let grammar get in the way of learning German. My German friend says they study some grammar but not at junior year levels, proof that you shouldn't be studying grammar, especially in your native tongue, as then it becomes a translation exercise.
can anyone explain why it is 'der beste freund' without grammar lingo?
Probably not. Conjugation is based purely on grammar, so it can't really be explained without some discussion of grammar. You can get away with less study of grammar for your own native language mostly because years of experience have taught you how people speak. Often the grammar you learn for your native language is meant to make you more right, because everyone can already understand you but you're still making mistakes according to the language's rules; whereas the grammar you learn for a new language is to make you more understandable because you don't know how to construct a sentence in the first place.
For a language you're learning, you don't have that intuition from years of exposure, so you either need to (1) gain that exposure by having lots and lots of conversations in German, which will probably get you mostly-but-not-entirely-right grammar that people can generally understand, or (2) learn the grammar. If you don't study the grammar, that probably just means you're going to get a fair amount of conjugation wrong, and you may still be understood fine for the most part, but there will be noticeable mistakes.
So since you're asking about the conjugation in an individual sentence, I really have no way to explain it apart from discussing grammar. In short, "Der beste Freund" is the subject of the sentence, and the noun "Freund" is masculine gender. The correct form for a masculine subject is "der," and "beste" takes a more-or-less default ending of "-e" since we already conjugated "der."
German uses the masculine as sort of the "default" gender when we don't have a gender to specify. If we used feminine "Freundin" here, that would mean that Duo's best female friend was a duck, but that he might have closer male friends. We're not specifying friends of either gender, so (perhaps a bit counterintuitively) we use the "default" masculine, showing that we're counting all friends.
That Der is imposed by the von right? and it isn't a definite article
No, and no.
In the sentence Der beste Freund von Duo ist eine Ente., der is not "imposed" by the von, and it is a definite article.
For example, you could say Ich bin ein guter Freund von Duo. -- a similar sentence, but without using der; it has ein instead. The von Duo doesn't force or impose any particular article on the thing that comes before it.
Ok that's fair. I ask because, immediately when i saw the sentence I wrote, i felt like the Definite article was needed in the German, it made no sense to my naive ears. "Der beste Freund von Duo ist eine Ente." but then i saw that the English sentence didn't have the definite article, and so i proceeded to remove mine, or invented logic somewhere. So as English wouldn't require the definite, inversely German would?
i saw that the English sentence didn't have the definite article
Possessed nouns are definite by default, so "Duo's best friend" is definite because of "Duo's".
Unlike (say) Italian with la mia casa "the my house", English doesn't add a definite article to something that's definite by being possessed.
English does need a definite article if the possession is marked by "of", e.g. "the author of this book".
You can also say Duos bester Freund, in which case you would not need a definite article.
Why "Bester Freund von Duo ist eine Ente" is wrong?
For the same reason that "Biggest mountain on earth is Mt Everest" is wrong -- superlatives pretty much have to be definite, i.e. "the biggest mountain" and der beste Freund.
(In English, "Duo's best friend" is definite because of the possessive "Duo's".)
It is second, actually. The entire phrase "Der beste Freund von Duo" is the subject of the sentence and takes up only one position in the sentence. Longer phrases can often take up a single grammatical position if the phrase is altogether filling one role in the sentence (the subject, an object, an adverb phrase, etc.)
This is what I dislike about Duolingo... for learning purposes, please add a literal translation, it being correct or not. People try to mimic the sentence of the exercise but little do they know that's not want Duo wants. Adding a literal translation would help with understanding many words. It's also what all language learners first look for, because if you show the literal translation you start to understand the way that language works, and confusions like this wouldn't happen.
For example, little did I know that "auf wiedersehen" actually resonates with one of my native language sentences "la revedere", having the exact literal translation. It would've helped a lot if Duo translated it literally from the start for me.
"Ente ist beste Freunde vod Duo" why is this answer wrong?
Um... why do you think it is correct?
You wrote, roughly, "Duck is best friends ob Duo".
The English sentence has "a duck" (eine Ente), not "duck" (Ente).
It has "Duo's best friend = the best friend of Duo" (der beste Freund von Duo): singular and definite, not plural and indefinite "best friends" (beste Freunde).
And vod is simply wrong.