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- Topic: Swedish >
- "They are girls."
"They are girls."
Translation:De är flickor.
34 Comments
128
Are tjej and flicka the same? Say, would you use tjej to describe your daughter? Or a classmate? Or a stranger?
- 1331
Yes, tjej is good for all those. 'Tjej' is a little bit more colloquial, it can be used for somewhat older 'girls' – only really old/oldfashioned people call a 20 yr old a flicka. Also, min tjej is 'my girlfriend', but we don't use flicka like that.
Well, technically, "flicka" is simply a maiden - an unmarried girl/woman of any age.
Furthermore, "min flicka" could actually be used to mean "my girlfriend", but that may be a bit old-fashioned. I think of soldiers who has to leave their girls, as the song goes: "Han sa till sin flicka: du, jag kommer igen".
- 1331
I disagree about flicka being any unmarried woman, and min flicka for my girlfriend can definitely be found in older literature, but it's very old fashioned. I don't know anyone who says that.
Can we use mar instead of the verb be? Wiktionary has two definitions, 1. may, must, 2. to feel (good or bad), to be (ill or well). So how are ar and mar intertwined?
My "Complete Swedish" Kindle book goes through the various subject pronouns and states that "De" is the word for "they". It is pronounced "dåmm" in everyday language and sometimes written as "dom". Hope this helps.
You could write 'dom' but as far as I know, it's mainly used for speech instead of writing.
Both my teachers failed to mention it, EVER. I didn't even know that "De" was a thing that existed :( Thanks.
I remember de as they coz "dey" "they" but what i mess up with is when i SAY it i always say dey xD then i remember it dom
Question about umlauts: Does Swedish allow for ae to substitute for ä if you are deprived of umlauts with your current typing setup, as German does? And would å be typed ao or just o in this case?
- 1331
You can't really substitute them. åäö are letters like any other in Swedish, they are not versions of any other letters. Unlike in German, they have their own place in and dictionaries and in the alphabet. When people don't have a Swedish keyboard, they sometimes write a and o, or sometimes aa, ae and oe, but there's no standard for how to do this.
how do i know when a word is plural or a word is singular? what is the difference between a plural and a singular word?
Just like in English, a plural word doesn't have an article in Swedish ;)
Plural nouns do have articles in English, though. "Women are eating bread" is very general and most often you'd say, "The women..."
It would appear that in Swedish, "The women" translates to "Kvinnor," without needing an article.
Sorry to appear pedantic, but this seems to be a difference between the two languages, indeed.
That's not quite true. Just kvinnor means "women", in the indefinite. Swedish uses both a definite suffix and a definite article.
- women = kvinnor
- the women = kvinnorna (the -na suffix is common but there are more of them)
- the young women = de unga kvinnorna (the article is needed because of the adjective, and the adjective is also in the definite)
More rules govern when and how to use the definite forms. You'll encounter these later in the tree.
- år means "year".
- är means "are" or "is" depending on the person.
They're both used much the same as in English.
