28 Comments
I wrote "It is the children's tea" as we are doing a lot of plurals at the moment. Why is this wrong? Can't barn mean "child" or "children"? How do you write "the children" if it's not barnet? Thanks...
949
barnets can only mean the child's. It goes like this:
Singular: ett barn, barnet ('a child, the child')
Plural: barn, barnen ('children, the children')
For the genitive, just add the -s.
The robot voice on this one seems to be condensing "det är" down to sound like där. Is a contraction like that normal in spoken Swedish or is that a bug in Miss Robot?
No, this is pretty much how a native speaker would say it. ”Det” is pronounced as ”de/dä” depending on dialect, and ”är” is pronounced ”e” or ”ä”, so when you say ”det är” it usually just sounds like ”dee” or ”dää”.
In English hearing "it's" is way more common than "it is"-- making it it, at least in speech, essentially a single word. I think it's the same in many languages with these constructions
And in normal speech it can be reduced to a s sound, just because it's a word our brains expect and can kind of fill in. You can get lazy with normal speech in your first language, but when you learn another it becomes a lot more obvious - we just have to get used to the language, so we don't have to explicitly think about everything
Is there a difference between the way "De" sounds and "Det" sounds? Because I wrote "De ar barnets te"
- 949
Yes, de and dem are both pronounced as if they were written dom, but det is pronounced as de (in everyday speech) or det (when speaking very clearly).
I had to choose from words to translate the sentence in English, but the word "child" wasn't there, so I couldn't get the right answer.
- 949
That type of exercises seems to have its own set of bugs that we can't really do anything about. Sorry about that.
- "this" is den här/det här or denna/detta
- "that" is den där/det där or sometimes just det
I don't understand your response to this question :S 'Det är' is 'It is' or 'That is' , referring to something else.. 'This is' would be what please? It refers to something you have or experience currently.. I don't know what you mean by där/här
I'm sorry, I don't really understand your question. We have several ways of saying "this is" and "that is" in Swedish. The word här means "here" and där means "there", so det här means "this" and det där means "that". Does that help? If not, please rephrase your question and I'll try again! :)
does it matter if i say this is the child's tea instead of that is the child's tea? because it got me wrong :/
- 949
It says barnets and barnet is the child. (and the -s makes it genitive of course)
The "-s" at the end of the word makes it possessive - your literal translation there is tantamount to genitive case, but not how the sentence would actually directly translate. It's kind of like "child's tea", except in Swedish they don't add the apostrophe.
