Word order in German. Shouldn't Duolingo accept this answer?

Question

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!

Answer 1

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.

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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.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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.