57 Comments
I did not see the word fru until Occupation skill. Is it where it is supposed to be taught?
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Fru is taught in Family (lesson 2) which is before Occupations. Maybe you passed the skill on your first attempt? In that case you may not have been shown all words, since they are chosen randomly.
That's really ridiculous. I know it's not your fault - but Duolingo really must teach us all words on first lesson attempt, or who knows what we'll miss.
The fact that many people are saying that this is their first time seeing this word (including me) Indicates that there may be something wrong with the randomizer.
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Yes, I think this is how Duo works generally, because of the randomizing factor.
I repeated the lesson over 4 times and still didn't see the word fru, it happened also with a few other words, duolingo programers should fix those mistakes how can we report such a thing?
I thinkt that's quite annoying, especially since I am in a test were I cannot 'lose' a lesson. It takes longer if I make mistakes, but I have the feeling that then I just get the words it determined at the start, because I get many sentences two or three times in a lesson... (though this is an issue with the program, not with swedish)
It's definitely a Duo thing, not a Duo Svenska thing. I had the same problem learning Français, where it expected me to know words it never bothered to teach me.
I answered this question more than three times but i couldn't understand what isrelation between a.... priest ...and a minister and both answers were correct
I don't undestand how to fail the skill on my first attempt, unless intentionally. I mean, you still get hints for all words, so you can't really go wrong.
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Fru is an absolutely new one on me here as well - and I've 'strengthened' the Family section several times (I took a week to go back over everything I'd done so far before starting the Occupations lesson).
The one thing that I find interesting is how many of us didn't get the word fru. That suggests to me an actual bug in the Duolingo randomizer code, as opposed to random happenstance. I actually had asked for the words husband and wife to be added to the Family lesson, on a side thread, and Arnauti told me that wife was already in there [and husband simply uses man].
I wrote "My wife is a priestess." and it didn't accept that. Is there a female version of the word präst or should the translation be accepted?
präst = male or female priest
Sweden had its first female priests in 1960 and its first female bishop in 1997. Since this summer (2014), we have our first female archbishop.
Now, it is very common with female priests here, but it was quite controversial in the beginning and many male priests refused to ordain female priests.
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"A priestess" is pretty much the same as "en prästinna", so it should not be accepted here. There's a difference in meaning.
Ok :) I was just going by my native language (which isn't English), in which this would mean "My wife is a (male) priest."
in my native language (Dutch) there is also "priester" and "priesteres", which are male and female words. But if she were a christian priest (are there certain christian beliefs where that is possible?) people would use the 'male' form of 'priester',I think, because 'priesteres' sounds new-age-y.
The word prästinna almost sounds like sorceress in my ears. You would never call a female christian priest prästinna. I'm not entirely sure I get your question if that is possible, but of course it is possible to be a female priest. At least in Sweden.
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It’s the same in English: Dawn French in The Vicar of Dibley would always be called a priest, never a priestess. (For a source, see e.g. writings or profiles of Joy Carroll, the Anglican priest that French’s character was based on.)
Yeah, I'm from Croatia and we only have catholic priests here and women become nuns instead, I think
we would not call a female priest a priestess, either, for the same reasons. And indeed, I was wondering if it was possible to be a female priest. To me, 'priest' means you're catholic, and the catholic church does not allow women to be priests... Other religions do, but then I would call it 'minister'. (or 'iman' or other things, but I'm pretty sure imans can't be women either)
What does "prästinna" mean if not "female priest"? In English, priest is masculine and priestess is feminine. " Prästinna" sounds like the femiine form of "präst", which should be the same as female priest, correct?
I think there are a lot of assumptions going on in this case, whether you want to use "priest" or "priestess", depends on context. I suppose for any sort of christian priest, regardless of gender, you'd use "präst". For pagan or new-age "clergy" you'd use either "präst" or "prästinna" depending on gender. In the exercise, we don't know if the female priest in question is a christian one or not, but since Christianity is most common denomination of priests in Sweden (and there are different words for Jewish or Muslim clergy anyway), then I suppose that's why we must use "präst" here. As often when learning a language, your context is whatever is most common!
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In Sweden, there's the Church of Sweden (which was once the state church, but isn't anymore) which has präster = 'priests' although it's a Lutheran church. But there are also other Lutheran churches, which have pastorer = 'ministers' or 'pastors'. (We also of course have branches of the Catholic Anglican churches with präster too plus various other religions).
So not all Lutheran clergy are priests here either. But the Church of Sweden is the biggest religious community.
Cool! I didn't know about "pastorer" thanks for this info. I suppose the terms "ministrar" and "minister" are used only for government officials.
I have never heard 'priestess' before. In my circles they are usually just called bishop, deacon, minister, preacher, pastor or reverend. Never really hear priestess or priest. Cultural.
Just curious, but does "Fru" have any sort of connection for the German "Die Frau"?
This bug has obviously not been corrected as most of the posts about 'fru' are a year old or so - I've just done this skill and this sentence was the first time I'd seen 'fru'.
It seems that nobody knows why they are priest. Just like Henry the eighth, the church of Sweden was separated from Rome just because king Gustav couldn't install his own archbishop. Swedes used to be profoundly Catholic so he failed to introduce the Lutheran faith as the German way, so he kept the church the most catholic possible, including the priesthood of the ministers, so the people could accept the new faith without issues.
It had more to do with him wanting the vast wealths of the church, but he could not just take it.
Why does 'präst' means a priest? I thought 'a priest' would be 'en präst'..
We normally don't use articles with professions. You can read more about that here https://www.duolingo.com/comment/6122883.
Mr = herr. Mrs = fru. Miss = fröken. Since these aren't really used that much, there hasn't really been a need to develop a word for Ms.
Don't use these when you address a person in Swedish, it sounds really old-fashioned and weird. Just use the person's name. These are only ever used in very formal communication, and even then mostly in writing.
Wait, are we speaking about chatolich church? I didn't even know women could become priests or bishops, i taught they were forced to be sisters
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Are you on mobile? There's a long discussion above on this page that explains it all.
tl;dr; :
Priests in the Church of Sweden are correctly called präster in Sweden and priests in English, just like Anglican priests are priests albeit not Catholic. Lutheran 'priests' of other kinds have other names both in Swedish and in English. A priest can also be a non-Christian priest, such as a Zen priest.
sorry i should have replied to helencarlsson in her Sweden's female priest history. i assumed he(she?) was talking about chatolic church 'cause as far as i know bishop is a term exclusive to christianity... I don't know much about protestant churches around the world so I didn't know Sweden had it's own Church and that they allow female priests, so i got a bit confused from the post, not from the sentence itself (i only came here because i met the term fru for the first time here, too)
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The Church of Sweden is a protestant church but it has priests and bishops who can be female. Again, the Church of Sweden is more similar to the Anglican in this respect than to the free Lutheran churches, who don't have bishops.
In Finland, there are two national churches, one smaller, orthodox which belongs to the Constantinople church, and a bigger, Lutheran one, which also has priests and bishops.
We should probably have a longer post about this, since a lot of people, especially in the US, seem to think that a priest can only be a Catholic priest.
Edited after comment from annika_a.
Thanks! BTW most English speaking Latin-Americans would think of a "priest" as a catholic or christian orthodox one, and they'd probably be inclined to go with something like "pastor" for any protestant clergy-person, but that's mainly due to unfamiliarity with the culture (things like national churches and Anglican or Lutheran traditions are quite foreign to us).
tack! it's cool to get to know more than "just" a language via these comments! :D
by the way, here in Italy there's this common thought too, mainly because the word prete tends to be used in reference to chatolic priests and sometimes anglican ones, while sacerdote and pastore respectively refer to orthodox and lutheran priests.
As far as I understand, the Lutheran and Orthodox Churches of Finland are both considered to be national churches, rather than state churches (which would entail a closer legal tie between church and state).
The Orthodox one (which only counts about 1 % of the population among its members) has an archbishop and bishops called metropolitans -- isn't that the coolest job title ever?
On the topic of debate here, I feel that priest is the best English translation for präst. It's not going to fit in every situation, but it's the closest match.
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You're right about national of course, my mistranslation.
At least the Church of Sweden uses priest in their English texts, so that's what they should be called.
Hey people is it so difficult to you to predict what this word means?
There's a whole discussion about this if you scroll up -- prästinna is the word that would be translated as priestess, but this has quite different connotation from the word used in this sentence.
ar sounds here as an open a. Is it because fru, ended in a vocal, preceeds it?
