"Kvinnan lagar mat."

Translation: The woman cooks.

[superdaisy]

So this isn't a verb word so much as a verb phrase? Does "lagar" ever mean "cooks" on its own? (Cooking up trouble, cooking as in being too hot, cooking as in Breaking Bad, etc, or possibly some non-idiomatic phrase that doesn't occur to me at the moment.)

[Spray]

If it is anything like Danish then on its own it means 'makes'

[Lottie1308]

It means fix/make on its own indeed :)

[JavadMousa3]

So as you say...the woman cooks food...must be acceptable answer but it is not

[devalanteriel]

That answer actually is accepted.

[emiloxy]

Since Spray's comment doesn't have a correction following it, am I correct in assuming that lagar+mat means "cooks," and that "lagar" on its own doesn't?

EDIT: Nevermind! I found https://www.duolingo.com/comment/5892480 :) Great note!

[nnikolovski]

I hear that "lagar" is pronounced "loger", but there's no "o" and "two dots" above the "a". Is this right? :)

[Zmrzlina]

That's not right. Lagar is /lɑːgar/ and the TTS has it right here.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/laga#Swedish has audio of laga too, if you want another source with a human saying it.

Hope it helps! :)

[nnikolovski]

The human clearly says it, while the TTS kinda have "soft" vowels.

Tack så mycket!

[ashxrt]

Whenever I try to translate 'lagar' anywhere other than duolingo it tells me it means' laws', and that 'cooks' is 'laga'. Can someone explain this for me please?

[TobyBartels]

First, ‘laga’ is the infinitive form of the verb, which in English is just ‘cook’ (or ‘to cook’ sometimes), never ‘cooks’. In the present tense, this becomes ‘lagar’, so that means ‘cook’ (after ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘you’, ‘they’, or a plural noun) or ‘cooks’ (after ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’, or a singular noun).

Meanwhile, ‘lag’ is a noun that means ‘law’. The plural becomes ‘lagar’, which means ‘laws’. (And the definite forms are singular ‘lagen’ and plural ‘lagarna’.)

So ‘lagar’ can mean either ‘cooks’ (or ‘cook’) as a verb or ‘laws’ as a noun.

[ashxrt]

tack!

[The_Swedish_Chef]

How would one say "the woman cooks food"?

[sotnosen93]

"Kvinnan lagar mat.", just like the sentence. As other commentators have already explained, this is a compound noun. "Lagar" means "makes" or "fixes", "mat" means "food".

[hellerm]

I noticed superdaisy's post didn't have a very good response. Is lagar mat a compound verb and if so, what does each part contribute? Thank you!

[Arnauti]

Someone posted a link to this post, which explains how the verb works: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/5892480

There's a collection of useful links as a pinned topic under Swedish Discussions, where you can find more of these explanations.