"Jag har en sköldpadda."
Translation:I have a turtle.
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Nifty, I love etymology.
Also yes, sk is an h sound [with extra H on the side and a bit of h-flavored garnish] when it comes before certain vowels. {No, seriously, it's like an H on steroids, you really emphasize the sound.}
IIRC those vowels are: e, i, y, ä and ö. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it's those five. Before a, u, o and å it's a regular old sk sound, like in svenska and skål :)
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Nice! In Dutch, it's 'schildpad' which also means 'shield toad'. I like the fact there are so many similarities, it makes learning so much easier.
turtles are so difficult to say in Swedish. Why couldn't Swedes borrow the word from Finnish, kilpikonna :D
Jag har en skölpadda och Jag älsker min skölpadda! Hopefully I constructed that all correctly :P
If this is discussed in another thread, just give me the link, but because the word "turtle" covers different species according to one's dialect of English (see here http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/turtle) I can't help asking whether "skölpadda" can mean any turtle/tortoise/terrapin or just some of these?!
It can mean either one of them. If you want to be specific, you can refer to them as havssköldpadda or landsköldpadda, meaning "sea turtle" and "land turtle" respectively.
When you say "land turtle", you mean tortoise. Turtles live in the sea, tortoises live on land. There's no such thing as a land turtle. ;D
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I guess that what she/he said was the litteral translation. So it might be as well "land shield toad" ! :)
In France, we also make no difference between turtles/tortoise, we call them all 'tortue', and when needed we specify their habitat.
This sentence showed up for me in the Clothing section. Makes me wonder about Swedish fashion. I mean, does this jacket go with my turtle? Does this turtle make my butt look too big? :)
I believe the trenchcoat is the fashionable choice for the modern turtle.
But yeah, that'd be Duolingo hiccuping...
Is the SK simply a SH sound (as in shoot) ? Hard to hear from the robot.
The dialects can vary but "sh" is nor wrong. The ö sound is slightly harder to master. It helps to start with an "uh" sound. It sounds somewhere in between "shulled" and "shelled". Incidentally, in the UK, the tortoise lives on land and the turtle in water. Swedish doesn't make a distinction. Sköldpadda is used for both.
