"The woman eats an apple."
Translation:Kvinnan äter ett äpple.
28 Comments
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I don't quite get it yet; do we use ett for inanimate things, so for example it's ett äpple, but en man?
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It's random but you might want to know that around 75-80% of Swedish nouns are "en" and the rest are "ett".
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No, it has nothing to do with real gender. I see you're doing French, it's just a grammatical gender like le and la.
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yeah, I got it now, it's just some words are ett and some words are en; thanks!
It is probably rather tricky to get it correct all the time. Usually, immigrants who have learnt Swedish later on in life never gets it properly. When swedes are introduced to a new swedish word there are no way of knowing if its a n or t-word...so i usually go with 'en'.
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Someone before posted a good link about -en and -ett: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_grammar#Articles_and_definite_forms
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Yes if the word ends with a vowel you ditch the 'e' and just add the n last.. ett äpple becomes äpplet you ditch one 't'
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En kvinna can be any woman. Kvinnan is the specific (definite) woman.
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Would I be right in guessing that geminate consonants like 'nn', 'tt', &c., are used to represent the pitch accent that I keep hearing?
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Late answer, but double consonants represent that the vowel before them is short, and the consonant sound is long. With single consonants, the vowel before them is long but the consonant sound is short. It's unrelated to pitch accent.
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I don't think the pitch accent has anything to do with geminate consonants. For example, in 'pojke' the consonant isn't geminate but it still has a pitch accent.
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Hello, as far as I've observed, am I correct that there's only one verb conjugation for all persons? I guess it changes depending on the tense and the mood.
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Yes, it's the same for all persons. Verbs change for tense and mood, but not for person.
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äter is the present tense, it's used when you would say She eats or She is eating in English. äta is the infinitive, it's used with other verbs like you would use I like to eat or I like eating in English.
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Because 'en kvinna' is 'a woman' - and you need to put 'the woman', hence 'kvinnan' - see the very first comment at the top which explains this, about putting the 'n' on the end.