27 Comments
wonder how to listen to the difference of sounds between mannen and männen
It's as clear as English, usually (Man - Men). The speaker has a dialect.
For anyone having trouble, "man" is pronounced "mon" and "män" is more like the English "man"
It's similar to the difference in the English words "man" and "men", I've found. The "a" in Mannen sounds similar to the "a" in "man" (not exactly); and the "ä" in Männen sounds similar to the "e" in "men".
Isn't it rather vice versa? "ä-" in 'männen' sounds more like english 'man' to me...
Is there no clear difference in how to pronounce 'mannen' and 'männen', or am I just not hearing it?
"Männen" is pronounced exactly as you would say "mennen". The short ä and short e sounds are almost always identical in Swedish.
It's worth pointing out that for English speakers from the Southern United States (like myself), this analogy/example is NOT true.
Southerners pronounce "men" (and almost all "e-before-nasal-consonant" words) as if it were spelled "min" (rhymes with "pin").
So, if you're a southerner, it can be much harder to differentiate between "Man" and the non-southern pronunciation of "Men" (and, by extension, between "Mannen" and "Männen").
Us southerners need to keep a wary ear out for the subtle difference between "-ehn" sounds and "-an" sounds, as we aren't used to hearing the former.
i'm also having problems hearing the difference between mannen and männen. Is it just a subtle difference that I'm not hearing?
How can you tell when it's "the men" versus just "men"? Some of my answers were marked wrong because I left the "the" out of my translations, even though my answer sounded fine in English and made perfect sense. Is there some trick to knowing when to use an article and when not to when translating from Swedish? Are articles like "the" just not typically used in Swedish, so the translation depends entirely on context (in which case my answers were also right)?
Swedish uses suffixes to show definiteness. Using this example:
- men = män
- the men = männen
Perhaps there's an exercise where we write in Swedish what we hear, and the speaker says "mannen" and "männen" in the same phrase......then we'll be able to hear the difference
Would you like me to make a recording for you where I go through them slowly?
Well, that took six attempts because my cat kept meowing into the microphone, but here you go: http://duolingo.vydea.io/82ad2ae475f148df94bbfc59ce33b5ed.mp3
This file contains six separate pronunciations:
- mannen
- männen
- long a sound - as in vasen
- long ä sound - as in väsen
- short a sound - as in mannen
- short ä sound - as in männen
It would probably have made more sense to put the long sounds last, but you'll get the point anyway. :)
Hope this helps!
Thank you.....isn't it strange and wonderful how our ears don't hear things we're not used to? (Or our eyes don't see things we don't want to etc etc!!)
Very much so! I had so many problems for the longest time in the Russian course for the exact same reason, before it finally started to magically make sense.
