42 Comments
Come to Almería (Spain) and discover it! We are the european city with the highest amount of hours of sunlight per year
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This is a reference to a song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUA7g9SHFF8
I like that song. It makes me happy. And, I picked up a few lines from it! (Besides the title, obviously), so, thanks Arnauti!
Oh, and I have a question for you Arnauti, is it just coincidence that you and Anrui's usernames are so close in sound?
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I'm glad to hear that! I think it's very useful to listen to songs in the language you're learning.
The names are actually a total coincidence Isn't that odd? His is his Chinese name I think, but mine is an Albanian name I picked from a character in a novel. I think however that it reflects what sounds nice to a Swedish ear.
Funny! "Arnaut" is a word in Romanian for a kind of a 18-19th century soldier, word probably borrowed from Greek or Albanian..
Historically there was some small Albanian presence in Odessa, Ukraine, and we have a street named Малая Арнаутская after them ;)
Yeah, I agree. Funny how that happened. Are you and him friends through duolingo? Like, because of duolingo have you two become friends, with the whole Swedish journey through making a course? (That's a feat)
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Yes, I didn't know him at all before the course. He's a great guy, I've been very lucky to have him as a co-mod.
Come on! I was gonna write i believe in summer until i saw the hint that tror also means think and wrote think about the summer because it makes more sense!
Is this stating that I believe that summer exists, or that during the summer, I believe?
Having endured a Swedish winter and experienced the utter joy/bliss/ecstasy of finally seeing spring/summer returning, I completely understand this song now!
There certainly is a point in late winter where the days are dark and long and you really do need to have a faith of sorts that the winter is not never ending... hence “I believe in the summer”. It captures that feeling very well!
BTW Swedish summer is all that is good in the world!!!
Thanks. I struggled to understand why 'I think of the summer' wasn't acceptable.
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Yes. Both jag tror på dig and jag tror dig are just fine. (If you mean 'believe in' like in, say, thinking somebody could have a great career, only the first one works, but usually either one is fine).
C'mon! Really? where is the logic in here? and why "I think about summer" is incorrect? :(
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I think about summer would be Jag tänker på sommaren. There's an excellent explanation by Lundgren8 about 'tro', 'tycka' and 'tänka' here: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/5577824
For me it's a weirdest sentence in this course (till now). It wins against horses eating your hats and cats drinking your milk :)
I thought it was "I think in the summer" (I suppose implying that my brain lies dormant all winter...a safe bet!). Could this be a possibility?
I would probably go for the preposition "om" in this case, but it's an extremely weird sentence.
You know it is really frustrating to experience a new word and getting the answer wrong just because the sentence is meaningless and a perfectly logical possibility is presented in the hints. Not to mention that "think of" would be much more useful verb to learn that "believe in" in the first place...
This sentence is by no means meaningless. It is a refernce to a song which actually captures a lot of the Swedish mentality and relationship to the summer.
Also, in terms of learning languages, sentences that don't necessarily make absolute sense are extremely efficient since they force you to trust your knowledge about the words. In this case "tror" only means "believe" and cannot mean "think", and forcing you to trust your language knowledge and not your gut feeling is great for your improvements.
Having said that, I do understand your frustration, but learning languages must be frustrating, otherwise you're probably not doing it right...
Fix the hints then, please. I agree that "tricky" questions are very useful for learning, but care should be taken that /new/ information is never presented in a bogus way.
As for cultural references I got interested in Swedish because of "Åh vilka tider" so I understand that, and it is very useful to know /afterwards/; and there could and should be a direct feature in the UI for those. But it is still no excuse for unfair testing.
For this word I think that "think" means "presenting your opinion" or belief rather than the setting of "thinking about" something generally. A subtle difference which would not be apparent to us before we learnt the meaning but in retrospect it is clearly a different use of "think" to the definition of "tänker".
Anrui, am I on the right track?
Having got this wrong in the same way as zsguthy I now feel that I am MORE likely to recall the correct usage of these words rather than less as I had to work out exactly why it was that I was wrong.
The hints are, as far as I can see indicative of the suggested answer
Jag - I
Tror - believe
På - in
Sommaren - (the) summer
The answer on my phone says "I believe in summer" not "the" summer - is this just aglitch?
We accept it both ways because of, well, grammar - but there's an idiomatic difference here in that Swedish expresses the same sentiment in the definite that English does in the indefinite here. So the translation is correct.
"think" is (was) the second choice for "tror", and there was even a third one that I don't remember; "about" is among the choices for "på" that fits "think". So the a logical solution leads to the wrong answer.
