36 Comments
In Britain we have sweets, not candies, whether or not the dog gets them first. Please accept British English!
835
The dog ate the sweets is already an accepted answer. What did you put exactly?
Please 1) report things like this via the Report a problem button, not in the forums 2) if you do write about it in the forums anyway, always state exactly what you put and what kind of question it was.
Is godsi an utrum or neutrum word? This https://sv.wiktionary.org/wiki/godis shows both to be possible :/
To me it works like "kaffe" and "öl" for example.
Hunden åt godiset./Hunden drack upp kaffet.
Kan jag få en (bit) godis?/Kan jag få en (kopp) kaffe, tack?
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Also when you say Тфу!, we say Tvi!, and you can use ой pretty much the same way – we have a few things in common when it comes to interjections!
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I noticed that there are some sounds that are similar... we don't have them in English but I know them from Russian.
Actually the more I study the Swedish, the more I notice the similarities between the Russian and Swedish and I find it incredible (this applies both to words and pronunciation). However I still keep experiencing troubles with certain sounds :(
We also say "fuu" in Estonian.
It's really interesting how many similarities I have found between so different languages as Swedish and Estonian. Especially in the business chapter (we have investeering, konkurents, reklaam, valuuta, aktsia and also Swedbank and SEB :D).
I do not like that there are a lot of words which come from American English yet when you use British English it is categorized as a mistake: in this case candy - it is a common word in the States, but in Europe the meaning for godis is actually a sweet, not candy. There was also another word which needs to be accepted that down town and city centre has the same meaning just on the different continents, could this be fixed?
- 835
- godiset is a mass noun so it does not mean a sweet.
- the sweets is already accepted.
Duolingo is an American company so the main translations are supposed to be in American English, but British versions should always be accepted where appropriate. As a general rule, please 1) report things like this via the Report a problem button, not in the forums 2) if you do write about it in the forums anyway, always state exactly what you put and what kind of question it was.
Drat! I still can't see why I cannot translate "godiset" as "sweet"! Why am I expected to know exactly what the Americans mean by "candy" when I'm trying to learn Swedish?
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I don't know that this is particularly helpful, but as an American I see "a candy" and "a sweet" to be different things. A sweet could refer to anything that quenches my sweet-tooth whether it be a candy or chocolate or a piece of pumpkin pie. Candy on the other hand is a very specific, probably bite-sized, unhealthy food item.
I'm not sure which is meant by godis...
Is "godiset" plural? I put "The dog ate the sweet" and was marked wrong.
Thanks, Arnauti. I had seen the hint, but was not familiar with the term "mass noun". I've always referred to "countable" and "uncountable", which are self-explanatory. So it appears that Swedish "godiset" and AE "candy" are exact cognates, whereas BE "sweet" isn't. The trouble is, to a British mind, it is not clear why this sentence cannot mean "The dog ate the sweet" - though you will say that there would then be a problem with back translation. Oddly, I have never encountered a discussion about back translation in other DL courses I have studied.
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With countable nouns, if you say the X, that will mean that you're talking about one piece.
Eg The dog ate the apple. This means that the dog ate 1 apple. In the same way, The dog ate the sweet means that the dog ate 1 sweet. But that is not what the Swedish sentence means, so it's not a correct translation. So it's not about the back translation, just that it's wrong as a translation into English.
When countability/uncountability doesn't match between the languages, the translation has to reflect that. If the Swedish noun is uncountable, but the English is countable, you need to use the plural instead in order to get the same meaning.
Let's look at an example of the reverse case. In English, furniture is uncountable but in Swedish, en möbel, möbeln, möbler, möblerna is countable. If I'm translating an English sentence saying the furniture, I cannot translate it into Swedish with möbeln, because then I'd be changing the meaning of the sentence. So if an English sentence says: The furniture was old and worn, that translates into Swedish as Möblerna var gamla och slitna. If I say Möbeln var gammal och sliten, that means that one specific piece of furniture was old and worn, but that's not what the English sentence says.
Thanks a lot, Arnauti, for these in depth comments. Btw, I have another comment about your mentioning above that DL is an American company. I keep getting your daily reminders to pursue, at 1:24 am every night and quite often they knock me out of sleep. Is this because these reminders are sent out at 7:24 pm US local time, and cannot this time be changed to more human hours for ypur many European customers? Sure, I could disable WLAN or message delivery or sound, but often I forget. Sorry, but I did not know where else to put this comment.
Late reply and I'm not Arnauti, but the unfortunate answer is that we can't affect that. I honestly don't know what they use to set the time. But mine are set for 5 pm, and I get them at about 5 pm CET every day. Maybe try logging in through one of the mobile apps and add them there if possible? I figure that way maybe they'll use the system time of your cell.
If you go into settings, you can set the time for the reminders... I live in the UK and I set it to 5pm UK time and that's the time they go off... Definitely in the settings of the mobile app
