"Pojken äter dem."
Translation:The boy is eating them.
86 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
WHAT!!!! So you are telling me, you live in an English speaking nation, and you do not know what TWINKIES are!!!!! They are store bought pastries with whipped cream inside of them. They are tasty, but they are bad for the body. When the company went out of business, there were riots in the streets until some millionaire bought the company. It was madness!!! I, personally, do not care for them. But most Americans do.
Native english speaker here. This topic is referring to people mostly. Jag tycker om henne, De älskar oss, etc. We make the connection a little ways into the lesson that this is mostly referring to people and then we see "The boy eats them." so we don't instantly break the connection that this topic isn't just about people, but could actually (hopefully in this case) be about foods or something else you would eat.
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Yes, "dem" (them) can refer to anything in plural. Potatoes, girls, footballs, eggs, socks, globes, houses, police forces.....
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I'm a native English speaker and I don't assume "dem" is in reference to people, especially in this case. "The boy is eating them" sounds just fine to me, and it clearly means he's eating some type of food.
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What kind of chimichangas are you eating that they're not mutually exclusive with cannibalism...
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What I am confused about is not "den" but the translation of "ater" (sorry about the lack of accent markings but I'm not working with a Swedish alphabet). I translated it as "eat" instead of "ate" them. How do you know how to translate the verb into the proper tense when multiple forms are correct?
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Mike, the correct translation here is eatS. Not eat and not ate. But eats is present tense. We won't be introduced to past tense until later.
So I'm curious, what gave you the idea that there is a tense ambiguity in this DL exercise?
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Ok, would anyone please let me know why "The boy's eating them" isn't considered correct here?
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Usually not, in this context... :-) But if you would've been referring to "dem" in "Vi såg dem" (We saw them) it could've been humans or cats or poles or waves or holes or meatballs or anything... :-)
662
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"What do you do with the potatoes?"
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"I eat them."
The same dialogue in Swedish would be:
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"Vad gör du med potatisarna?"
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"Jag äter dem."
But of course "dem" could be used for humans/dogs/trees (just like "them" in English) - but just like in the English dialogue it can be used for a collection of anything. Swap "potatoes" for any plural noun and the dialogue would work (even though I doubt anyone would be eating "cars" :-) ).
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I cannot but hear "pojken äter /om/". I get that "dem" is pronounced /dom/, but I don't even hear the /d/ sound. Is it something with me, with audio in this specific case, or is there something I don't understand?
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I was going to make a sarcastic remark about eating people a la Hannibal ... but I see many have already beat me to it!
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The lady? The "spoken" voice for this exercise? In that case "she" certainly didn't say "den", since "she" says "dom" (the colloquial pronunciation of "dem"). "Den" is always pronounced with an 'e'/'ä' sound, so it's quite different from the pronunciation used in the exercise.