"En flicka"
Translation:A girl
16 Comments
This is extremely weird since "the" isn't listed under "en" according to the system. I'll look into this. "The" is NOT accepted
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The legendary first word of each language. Your journey begins with en flicka.
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Mine began with "en man" Just like how my German journey stated with "der Mann," my Dutch journey started with "man," and my Danish journey started with "En mand."
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Yeah, yeah, I know. (secretly my first word on the Swedish course was en pojke). For whatever reason, in my mind, learning "girl" is the defining moment for the beginning of a course. I'm not sure why. Looking the circles next to your name, I can see you know where I'm coming from when I say it's different all the time. For me, Italian started with la ragazza, Portuguese started with a menina, Irish started with cailín, and Danish started with pigen. As for you, it seems all the Germanic languages are conspiring against you to teach you "man". Oh well, your journey begins somewhere around that area. Good luck with the Swedish-studying, for everybody :)
Each noun is either en or ett, just like French nouns are either la or le or German nouns are der, das or die. It has to memorized with the noun.
Ett is an, and you would use an before a vowel instead of saying a And en is a
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Are you sure? Excuse me, but I just don't think that is true. As I believe, and judging from experience, en and ett should be used for different "genders" of nouns, regardless of whether the next word starts with a consonant or vowel. For example, ett barn (a child). This is an understandable confusion if you are just starting out from English (I know I shouldn't assume that you are just starting out, but if you are, that is probably why). Either way, don't worry about it, just let the course do its teaching! ;)
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If what you said is correct, then why did I just learn "en flicka" and "en man"? They should be different genders. The only reason I can think of is that linguistically the gender doesn't correspond to the physical gender, kind of like in German "das Mädchen".
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MikeFenger, I don't know much about North Germanic languages, so I may be wrong, but I think "en" indicates common gender. I'm pretty sure Swedish has exactly two genders, but they are not masculine or feminine. Rather, like Dutch, it has a common gender and a neuter gender. The common gender is, at the same time, both masculine and feminine. And so, en man and en flicka are masculine and feminine respectively, and both fall into the common gender. However, vattnet - the water, is neuter (or ett vatten, but that means "a water" and that doesn't really make sense to me). However, even if the physical and grammatical genders align so far, we don't know if there is still a "das mädchen" waiting out there. :)
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Thanks Romanadvoratrel! Really helpful. I had no idea about the common gender.