28 Comments
Omöjligt... The most you can have is 5,000 on a private account... That is why I cannot send Eefje de Visser a friend request. :(
Oh my god, I showed this sentence to a friend while adding "på Facebook" to it... then I saw this.. what the
the moment I translated the phrase, the "Social Network" soundtrack started playing in my head :P
It doesn't make a difference here, but touches on it: Does Swedish use the long or short scale of large numbers? That is, is a billion a thousand millions, or a million millions?
We use the long scale. I'll use numbers to ensure I don't screw up. :)
- en miljon = 1 000 000 = an English million
- en miljard = 1 000 000 000 = a modern English billion
- en biljon = 1 000 000 000 000 = a modern English trillion
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I just noticed that Swedish doesn't use commas to group their large numbers.
I'm sorry, I don't understand - what do you mean? Either "one" or "a/an" is perfectly fine.
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I had to look up what the long short scales were; I had never heard of them before now. For anyone else curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
No. Its en miljon. It is the miljon we are talking about hereo matter what comes after it
I dont really understand the long scale of numbers, a milkion million is not a billion. Thats mathematically incorrect. It would be a trillion.
It's not a universal truism of mathematics - that's the whole problem. It's regional. In other regions, the words are defined such that a million million IS a billion. It is not a question of mathematics, but one of linguistics. What is "mathematically correct" is that 1 000 000 x 1 000 000 = 1 000 000 000 000, but exactly what you CALL that number varies - not just between language families (Swedish isn't the only one to use the long scale, I'm pretty sure), but even between English-speaking regions.
SI prefixes, on the other hand, ARE standard. 1 Mm = 10^6 m, and that's true wherever you are. This linguistic collision of terms is why scientific notation exists
I see, but the meaning of the word million is still the same. In that it is 1,000,000.
We dont say a million friends in english. Shouldn't it be she has million friends?
It depends on the dialect. In American English (which is what Duolingo courses are usually based on), it's very common to say "A million", and sounds unnatural to say "Million" without a number or article before it.
I am a native UK english speaker and I have no problem with saying some one has a million friends. Probably a bit of an exaggeration though but not uncommon in spoken english. We would never say she has million friends or hundred friends. We would always put a number or just an "a" before it.
You put the "a" in to say that the million is not exact, in the way English can also say about or like a million. Maybe OP was saying something like millions instead?
