- Forum >
- Topic: Swedish >
- "Barnet tycker om mig."
23 Comments
This just reminded me- does Swedish have different words for love romantically and love as a relative?
1369
No, we only have älska and tycka om/gilla. You can use all of them for relatives too, depending on how much you like them :)
(tycka om and gilla are of the same strength, it's just that gilla is a little bit more colloquial)
Re-recording
The voice is not quite perfect on this sentence, as of May 10th, 2018, so I've taken the liberty of re-recording it.
In this case, the error isn't huge. But tycker om is a so-called particle verb in Swedish, meaning that it's one verb consisting of multiple words. If you leave either word out, the meaning usually changes completely. And hence, stressing the right word is important. Almost always, this means putting the stress on the particle - the om, in this case. The automatically generated voice has a tendency to put the stress on tycker instead, which is never correct, or on the word after tycker om.
Please find a correct recording on http://duolingo.vydea.io/94f5e9ec528041b182033f4f1f4846e8.mp3
For more info on re-recordings, please check the info thread: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/23723515
Thanks for listening. Ha en bra dag! :)
- 1369
Yes, it's a ’colloquial spelling’, it's not wrong, but I wouldn't recommend using this spelling.
- 1369
Unfortunately there's a problem with the 'listen and type' exercises – Duo can't make alternative spellings accepted in those. So dej, mej etc are always accepted in the translation exercises (there may be rare exceptions of course: always report those via the Report a problem button, and we'll add it there too) but at present they're not accepted in the dictation exercises. This isn't something we as course creators can fix, unfortunately.
I don't think so, got to learn it early how it's only pronounced "mej" in swedish but spelled "mig"
Du to barn being both singular and plural could barnet not mean both the child likes me and the children like me? Surely both are correct given there is no context of the sentence?
- 1369
No, it goes like this:
Singular: ett barn, barnet
Plural: barn, barnen
So while the indefinite forms are the same in the singular and plural, the definite forms are unique. barnet only means the child, and barnen only means the children.
I do not love you -The child likes me... Sounds like a bloody divorce to me.
- 1369
mig is pronounced as if it were written mej, and I think it sounds like that here, but it can be hard to hear the difference between n and m sometimes.
Why is "think of" how you say like in Swedish? It seems 'like' there should be a dedicated word for this instead of saying transliterated, "The child thinks of me." See? So if I were to use the above sentence as an example "it seems like there should be a dedicated..." I wouldn't say "it seems think of there should be a.."?
- 1369
If we're doing the thought experiment to transliterate it anyway, tycker om is a particle verb. And since om isn't a preposition here, you should probably use 'around' instead which can be an adverb. You also shouldn't use 'think of' because it already has a Swedish counterpart in tänka på. And you should say this 'think around' with a strong stress on 'around'. But mainly of course you can't really transliterate it with any adverb because the adverbs don't correspond well enough for that – you just don't have one in English that carries the same meanings. And 'think around' would be better translated into Swedish with 'tänka runt' or 'tänka kring' so yeah, it's a cul-de sac. But it's fun as a thought experiment :)
Anyway, Swedish has a lot of those verbs which consist of a verb and a particle. In some cases, you can put the particle first instead. You can't with tycka om, but you can with its participle omtyckt. (it varies from verb to verb: some verbs can only be used as particle verbs, some either way, and in some cases you cannot take off the first part and use it as a particle). This phenomenon is very common in German too, and you also have it to some extent in English although it isn't at all that typical. What you do have a lot of, and that every Indoeuropean language I've studied has a lot of, are verbs with prefixes, for instance 'dis-like', 're-structure', 'over-look' and so on and so on. The particle in Swedish corresponds to the prefix in those verbs (and as I said, it can sometimes also be used exactly that way). So my suggestion is to think of these particles as prefixes that have gained some degree of independence and are now moving around in the sentence.
Sorry for the long rant, I just thought the question was so interesting :)
tl;dr; See https://www.duolingo.com/skill/sv/Verbs%3A-Present-3
So, I selected "Barnet tycker om dig" which was accepted, even though the translation is 'The child likes me.' This may be a flaw in the software.
Yes, it definitely is. It's been reported, so the developers are aware of it. That's unfortunately all I can do.
