"Jag skriver på svenska."
Translation:I am writing in Swedish.
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Finally some reward from the course after having me write "Jag talar inte svenska" :D
Funnily, one uses the same preposition in this case in Russian: "po svenska" "po shvedski"
Well, it sounds 'ya' and jag seems to be more like 'yo', but then if there really was any influence, it was about 1000 years ago.
I've actually found it easier to compare the grammar to Russian than English, in some cases.
I noticed that "in" and "about" are both offered as translations of på by the program. Does that mean that this sentence could mean both "I write in Swedish" and "I write about Swedish?" Or is this some way to distinguish which definition of "på" is intended?
No, it's just that all hints for a word can be shown everywhere. So på can be translated as about in some other contexts (what comes to mind is Jag tänker på dig 'I am thinking of you') but not here.
If you want to say 'I write about Swedish', that would be Jag skriver om svenska:
Is there a rule or trend to knowing whether you would use om or på when wishing to express the word "about?"
Hm… about is usually om – I can't think of any other example than tänker på where it's på instead. (also verbs with the same meaning of course, like funderar på etc).
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ah, yes... I keep getting the two confused. I'm constantly slipping the odd Dutch word in here and Swedish in my Dutch.
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I haven't seen any words with 'sch' or 'ij' in Swedish yet. I think there are none. The 'ij' is typical Dutch, but the 'sch' does exist in German too.
There are actually many words with sch in Swedish, although we always use the pronunciation of e.g. "sh" in English.
I can't come up with any words that have an ij cluster, though - all excemptions are compounds where one syllable ends in i and the next begins in j, and of course that's not the same thing at all.
schack, schablon, schakal, schakt, schnitzel, schnauzer, schizofren, schottis, schäfer, schampo, schalottenlök, schweizisk, schema...
Those are just a small sample, and only words that start with sch.
I must amend what I said above, though. I wanted to make clear that we don't have the Dutch sch sound where the /s/ is followed by the /x/ - but a small number of loanwords use the /sk/ pronunciation, e.g. schizofren.
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I don't think there are any. I tend to confuse similar sounding words. I cannot get my head round the Swedish 'leker' because in Dutch 'lekker' means 'tasty'. It's tiredness that does it. The best way is to work on each language every day and keep at it. The other day I managed to get a long French word wrong - I'd taken half a Swedish word and added half a Dutch word and in the process managed to mangle three languages...
We actually have läcker in Swedish with the tasty meaning as well. :)
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Devalanteriel says that there are Swedish words with 'sch' . I hope he can give some examples, because I'm very curious about them. "Leker": I'm thinking of Lego to play with. Mixing languages: the Italian "gonna" sounds like the Dutch "japon", the chic word for dress, but it's skirt; and yes, I got it wrong once again. Yesterday I mixed Swedish with Italian: "una jacka" instead of "una giacca". The human brain has weird twists. What is your native language?
Is på also used as a preposition, like "in the box", or is it just with languages?
Is there a rule or guideline to determine whether a word ends in -er or -ar? I think it's a bit obvious that a verb ending in a vowel will have an -r ending in present tense, but what about verbs ending in consonants?
Generally, på is "on" and i is "in", but there are lots of exceptions, as you can see.
I replied this and they thought it was great, and it is clearly not-quite: jag skiriver påsvenska