"Prästen tar motorcykeln till kyrkan."
Translation:The priest takes the motorcycle to the church.
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Yeah, I totally was imagining Rob Halford riding his bike through the church doors, screaming all the way. :P
and this is (one of the reasons) why i love sweden! this would be a perfectly normal thing there, i think. apart from, you know... still having churches in the first place =)
Lol i remember once i went to church and i see a handsome leaving his motocycle then he was actually the priest by the way it wasnt in sweden lol
Why is "to the church" not correct since "kyrkan" is a definite form? And why is it definite btw?
It is the literal translation, but a more accurate English translation wouldn't include the definite article. Swedish sometimes puts things in definite form when English wouldn't. Two of those things that I'm aware of is when referring to the subject's place of work or study and when referring to something that the subject owns. So for example:
I'm going to school = Jag går till skolan (NB: "gå" refers to going by foot and not, for instance, by bus)
He forgot his wallet = Han glömde planboken
However, if you put a possessive pronoun before the noun, it shouldn't be in definite form.
In Swedish, it is fairly common to use things in the definite if they belong to an aforementioned subject or to the speaker. Thus, it's understood that the priest takes his own motorcycle to church. English can do this too to some extent, but it's more common in Swedish.
I was actually thinking about my father (a motorcycle riding priest) when I wrote this sentence.
What a badass female priest (is it really common in Sweden to be a woman and a priest? Here in Mexico there aren't any women who are priests, it is entirely a male thing)
Are you using the mobile app? On my laptop, there's no mention of the priest being a female.
The Swedish sentence has motorcykeln. The main English translation has the motorcycle, but his motorcycle and her motorcycle are also accepted translations and can be shown to you after you input your answer.
There is other sentence in the course, Min fru är präst, or something like that, where "the priest" is definitely a female one
Actually, as of this year, among priests in Sweden, women out number men: https://www.thelocal.se/20200828/inside-the-church-of-sweden-where-women-outnumber-men-as-priests
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I tried "The priest rides the motorcycle to the church", which was marked wrong. While Swedish may use take a motorcycle, just as take a bus, it is my impression that in English we would almost always use drive or ride in preference to take when we are discussing individual transportation rather than mass transit. But I do like the sentence!
It is common, at least for some dialects. eg. “Let’s take my car - or will you take your motorbike?”
“The priest takes her motorcycle” feels sliiiightly more informal to me than when using “drives” or “rides”.
Agreed. I take the metro but if I go by car, I simply drive. If I heard that someone had taken a motorcycle, I would assume they had wheeled it there or pulled it in a trailer behind their car. Still, awesome sentence to be sure. :)
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When you translate from Swedish to English using the predefined words, it can be quite confusing when you have to translate 'the motorcycle' to 'his' or 'her' 'motorcycle'.
Hopefully it's also helpful, since that's the most idiomatic way of translating it.
Most people in the UK would say 'motorbike'. Motorcycle sounds clumsy and old fashioned, and would probly be used by a non native speaker. Or a steampunk.
Both of us used the word "motorbike", but I would assert that it seems to me like "motorcycle" is more common in the English speaking world as a whole, or at least in USA. Though I'm not a native English speaker so this is just an educated guess.
I think that in the UK everyone would understand motorcycle but in everyday language it's always motorbike. Maybe in the US it's different.
Motorcycle is definitely more common here in the US, though it kind of depends on what you're talking about. For example, the stereotypical low slung designs with over-sized exhausts and obnoxiously loud engines that you see in a lot of video games and anime would almost never be called a motorbike here in the US.
It's true, "motorcycle" is more common in the U.S. Although by "motorcycle," I'm talking about ones that look like Fonzie's motorcycle on "Happy Days," Harley-Davidsons, etc. There are smaller, sportier, more colorful motorcycles that we call "crotch rockets," and one might refer to those as motorbikes here. Not as common though.
This describes my cousin perfectly. It was an entertaining sight to follow him in our car from one country church to the next on a Sunday morning when we visited him and his family. He was a big guy, tall and wide, and he created a big stream of white dust on those gravel roads, going pretty darn fast, his black robes waving wildly in the wind. I loved seeing that, lol. (He was a pastor, not a priest.)
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This is not an English sentence that a native would actually say. It should be: The priest goes to church by motorcycle. Or The priest rides his motorcycle to church. Or The priest motorcycles to church.
It's mainly the use of "the" before motorcycle that is problematic. You would take the bus, the tram or the train.. but with bikes, skateboards, motorbikes, unicycles, segways, anything where you would have your own personal transport, we would never refer to it as "the", we would use a possessive article or no article at all.
I don't know if it was just me, because I don't usually have trouble, but the TTS was extremely unclear on this example. The words just bled into each other. That's okay if you're a native speaker, but when you're learning the language elocution needs to be clear and concise. I learned this years ago from French exchange students who asked us to slow down our speech because we were speaking too fast for them to understand even though we thought we talked at a moderately slow pace. As native speakers, we hadn't noticed that we spoke 'fast' and that our words bled into each other even though we spoke in Received pronunciation.
Maybe it’s changed but the two audio recordings I got seemed fine/usual to me, and I’m terrible with aural comprehension.
Would "The priest goes to church with a motorcycle" be correct? For me it marks it as incorrect
That is one cool priest! (and I say that when I don't regularly go to a church...)
I just answered the same question from another user in this topic so scroll up or search for alexcherry24.
They can, and in Sweden, they often are. The Church of Sweden, as well as the Anglican church, has präster, 'priests'. Other protestant churches have pastorer 'pastors' or 'ministers'. Another difference between the Church of Sweden and [most] other protestant churches is that the Church of Sweden has bishops. (who can of course also be female).
So, the course teaches us terms of the Church of Sweden as opposed to other Swedish protestant churches? :-)
I didn't know there were several protestant churches in Sweden. I seem to be more used to multiple churches in countries divided in two parts - protestant and catholic. But then again, I'm very far from being an expert on the subject.
Catholic ones, no, but some Protestant denominations have priests who can be women.
Is 'till kyrkan' a fixed phrase in Swedish that can refer to specifically going to a religious service like 'to church' can in English? Asking because otherwise the lack of a definite article here for the translation of 'kyrkan' seems rather odd to me (unless it's possibly implying that the church is the one the priest is in charge of?).
So is "him". It's implied and based on perspective. Grammatically and socially correct.
(Cont) work by bike" and it was accepted. When I tried the same with this sentence it was not. Its because work and church are different?