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- Topic: Swedish >
- "Ett djur, flera djur"
31 Comments
If Duolingo just gives you the word "djur" without context, then you should be able to translate it either way for a correct answer. But in context, you can usually tell, just as with English words whose singular and plural are the same. (In fact, the English cognate of "djur" is one of those words: "deer".)
Has anyone noticed the odd way djur is pronounced at the end of a sentence or phrase? The "djur" of Ett djur sounds as expected, but the "djur" at the end of the phrase is something like djurija, even though they are spelled the same. It seems not to have anything to do with the fact that the second one is a plural as it does the place in the phrase -- I've seen this problem elsewhere.
Native here, it obviously sounds like the TTS software is messing up at the end. The first djur sounds better. This woman pronounce it correctly too:
http://lexin.nada.kth.se/sound/djur.mp3
If you are unsure of a word, you can use this link below and replace "djur" with whatever word you'd like to hear pronounced.
That's the Swedish rolling R. :) There's no V in there, that'd require you to touch your lips together but I assure you that's not the case.
There's also just a touch of the rolling R though, you kinda flick the tongue against the roof of your mouth once. That gives the abrupt ending so I think it might sound like a V to foreign ears.
The word "several" has a slightly formal feel about it, but at the same time it's rather vague. "A few", "a number of", even just "some" seem to cover it, but I haven't got any of these past DL. Of course, in some places they also say, "only a few, not many, a good few," etc and I once got "Several - or more" when I asked how many people had been at Church on a Sunday when I was on holiday.