it has happened to me that

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hhtt21

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What does "it has happened to me that" in "It has happened to me that I have forgotten to set it at the start."

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emsr2d2

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That's a very unnatural (I would go so far as to say ungrammatical) sentence. Where did you find it?
 

jutfrank

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It sounds pretty natural (and grammatical) to me as something someone would say when talking about their experience.

It's happened to me that... = I have personal experience of...
 

andrewg927

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It sounds to me like "it has occurred to me that I have forgotten...""
 

Tdol

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It has happened that I have forgotten to set it at the start.

This is possible, though there are more natural things like I have been known to forget to set it.
 

angelsrolls

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This is what hhtt21 asked in another forum, which is in Turkish. I translated the sentence into Turkish. But the literal translation didn't seem to work in Turkish. So I made some small edits to make the sentence more Turkish. The following is the version with my edits:

An event has happened to me in which I have forgotten to set it at the start.

Is it correct English?
 

hhtt21

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It sounds pretty natural (and grammatical) to me as something someone would say when talking about their experience.

It's happened to me that... = I have personal experience of...


Can "live through" be an alternative?

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GoesStation

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An event has happened to me in which I have forgotten to set it at the start.
Does the following work? I once forgot to set it at the beginning.
 

angelsrolls

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Does the following work? I once forgot to set it at the beginning.
An event has happened to me in which I have forgotten to set it at the start.


I guess I was misunderstood. This is the word-for-word English translation of my translation of the original into Turkish. I had tried to translate the orginal literally, only to end up with a clumpsy sentence. So I added the word event and now it sounds fine to me. While wandering around the forum, I saw this thread. Some of you found the original unnatural. So I thought I should jump in to ask how my version would sound to you.
 

GoesStation

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An event has happened to me in which I have forgotten to set it at the start.

I guess I was misunderstood. This is the word-for-word English translation of my translation of the original into Turkish. I had tried to translate the orginal literally, only to end up with a clumpsy sentence. So I added the word event and now it sounds fine to me. While wandering around the forum, I saw this thread. Some of you found the original unnatural. So I thought I should jump in to ask how my version would sound to you.
I'm afraid it is unnatural. I don't know what the sentence is supposed to mean.

Word-for-word translations rarely produce natural and understandable results.
 
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