39 Comments
What are the differences between "en" and "ett" ? I am still confused..
'en' is an indefinite article used for masculin and feminin words in swedish (grammatical gender rather than real gender). It translates as "a"-"an" in english.
'ett' is also indefinite article amd will translate also as "a"-"an" but is used for neutral words (ett barn(child) for instance). There is no equivalent in french or english but if you are familiar with dutch or german, they have also neutral words such as huis in dutch (house). Difference is in german and dutch, is that you can't really see it with the undetermined article but with the determined article (such as "das" in german or "het" in dutch).
There's a special list of words that use ett instead of the standard en. Google it and you'll see what I mean.
893
Tips & notes are at the beginning of each skill (a few skills don't have any) but unfortunately they can't be seen from mobile platforms. Here's a link to this one: https://www.duolingo.com/skill/sv/Basics-2
I can't hear the "r" very well. Should it be pronounced or it is just silent?
-rn is a single sound, a retroflex N. This happens when R comes before N, S, T or D.
"Theres only one thing worse than a rapest."
"Ett barn"
"What?...do you know what he said?"
"No idea"
- 893
Historical reasons. We used to have three genders just like German (neuter, feminine, masculine) but fem. and masc. collapsed into one (en gender or common gender today). The old genders go way back in history.
Is the "a" in "barn" supposed to sound like "bohrn"? Or is it just the accent?
- 893
Non native speakers often perceive our long a:s as sounding like o, but I hear a clear a here. You'll hear the difference better with practice.
A/an do not correlate to ett/en! In Swedish, grammatical gender is random and has to be learned with the noun.
You mix up real world people and objects with the cases of words. A child is of course considered as a person. It's the word barn itself that is neuter case, not the child it refers to.
I realize this is irrelevant, but can a fluent Swedish speaker tell me how to say "the tallest man on Earth" in Swedish?
Den längsta mannen i världen, though we'd more commonly say Världens längsta man (the world's tallest man).
- 893
In Swedish and English, we have a gender neutral word barn / 'child', which translate each other. In Spanish for instance, they use the word niño for this purpose although it also means 'boy'. So if you're translating between Spanish and English, niño translates as either child or boy, and it's the same if you translate from Spanish into Swedish, niño means both barn and pojke. But if you translate between English and Swedish, barn only means 'child' and pojke is only 'boy'.
This keeps saying its wrong for me, but i have typed "a child" over 5 times.
