"Jag äter er citron."
Translation:I am eating your lemon.
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Er is for -en word when the subject is a plural "you" (as opposed to din or ditt where "you" is one single person)
Maybe my audio is just bad but on Google translate and http://forvo.com/search/citron/sv/ I only hear the S sound like "SIH-tron." While I do hear "SHI-tron" here.
Someone please help me with du vs. ni. I seem to remember some old Swedish friends telling me that "ni" can mean you all OR you in a formal sense of the word. Is that true? Does Swedish have formal vs. informal speech like that? Is it like the Spanish/French/ etc informal versus formal "you?" Or am I completely off and it is only singular vs. plural "you?" Please help! Tack!
You are right. Ni written with "big letter" means you in a formal sense of the word. This "Ni" is the word from 1940th. Right now it's almost disappear from the landuage but you still can hear it from the young people when they want to show older people extra respect. For example you can hear this word from the workes in McDonald's in Stockholm when you are ordering something ))))
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Thanks so much. You are always so helpful and it's very much appreciated. When I listen to the voice on the site, the consistency of pronunciation isn't always .... well, so consistent.
Swedish nouns have different grammatical genders - common and neuter. Since common-gender nouns use en to mean "a/an", we call them en-words. And since neuter-gender nouns use ett to mean "a/an", we call them ett-words.
You can read a little more about it e.g. here: https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/26420394
Swedish has two ways of saying "your". It starts with d if you talk to one person, and e if you're talking to more than one. Then you have different endings for the gender and number of the thing you're talking about. So:
- din = one person, singular en-word thing
- ditt = one person, singular ett-word thing
- dina = one person, plural thing
- er = more than one person, singular en-word thing
- ert = more than one person, singular ett-word thing
- era = more than one person, plural thing