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- "It is a menu."
"It is a menu."
Translation:Det är en meny.
22 Comments
When do you use den or det for it? I thought that because meny was an -en word, it would go with den.
Duolingo flagged my use of den as a typo so I didn't lose a heart but I don't think I've understood Swedish pronouns properly.
195
I think it's like... When you say "Det" in the sentence, you are saying a general "it", you haven't identified what "it" is yet, so at that point in the sentence you can't say "den" yet because you don't know that it's a menu. If you were to continue the conversation and say "It is a menu. It is brown" then you could use "den" in the second sentence because you have already identified the menu in the context of the conversation. That is how I would rationalize it, if that makes sense?
This truly helped me to understand the usage of "det" and "den." Thank you very much.
like in German. You can use das for everything. das ist ein Rock. Er ist schön. But if you wanna use it again in the next sentence you gotta say, er/sie/es
Just grammatical gender, like un/une in French or un/una in Spanish.
They are not. 'En' is called common gender, whole 'ett' is called neutral gender, and their use is pretty random ('en' is much more frequent). Nothing to do with femenine/masculine.
"meny" is an "en" word so i used "den" because "det" is used with "ett" words but it was marked as a mistake .. Can any native speaker explains it please? Tack så mycket
Someone said you use en for living things, if that's the rule, then why isin't is "ett meny"?
No, I said that most living things are en-words. Not that en-words are always living things.
I've read that many borrowed words are of common gender in Swedish. (Or the ones where the stress falls on the last syllable)
Like: en kafé en badminton en termos en film
Most words in Swedish are of common gender regardless, actually. As for your examples... it's ett kafé, and badminton can't take a gender.
Oh! Thanks a lot for the corrections!
I just find it easier to remember it this way, especially when it comes to plural formation.
Is it accent or when this woman speaking: "Det är" is pronounced as "De ar"where ä doesn't pronounce as as "a" in english but "a" in german sorry for bad English
Pronounction of meny? Is it like the English word "many" or a "mun" sound. I'm partially deaf so having a hard time with some ending sounds
I think "En" is for animate and "Ett" is for inanimate objects. For example, a bok and a meny is considered animate because they have pages that move. An äpple is inanimate.
