"There is not enough food."
Translation:Maten räcker inte.
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Det finns inte tillräckligt med mat is a very good Swedish sentence which fits here.
Sure, it could also mean that. But in most contexts we would interpret this as the amount of food is insufficient rather than that we need something more than food.
English can express this in a number of ways, e.g. "there isn't enough food", "the food does not suffice", "we don't have enough food", etc.
As you can see, whether to use the definite or indefinite depends on the phrase used. Swedish works the same way - we'd use the definite and indefinite in the same expressions here. :)
Just idiomatics, really - Swedish requires the med here but there's no real reason.
what is the literal translation for this? I'm a bit confused about "räcker."
I'm a German speaker and so my guess - and it is a guess, so please anyone correct me - is that it is the same as the German verb "reichen", which has the same etymology as the English "to reach", so think of it as "the meat doesn't reach" (far enough) - i.e. there isn't enough of it
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I will tranlate "Maten räcker inte." with "The food is not enough". But I am not a native Englisch speaker.
No, but it's close. Firstly, we're talking about whether or not there is actually enough food existing, so you should use "finns". Secondly, when constructing it like that with "nog" preceding the noun it modifies, you need to say "nog med mat". However, "nog" can also come after the noun, in which case it's just "mat nog".
Hope that helps.
What's a literal translation of räcker? 'to exist in sufficient quantity'?
According to Tyda.com, räcker is the present tense of the verb "räcka" and it means: do, make, be enough, come, go, pass, extend, hand etc. I still cannot figure out whether this sentence could have multiple meanings. Maybe a moderator could help us.
No, räcka can mean to extend as in giving a hand or passing an item, etc., but it doesn't work here since it is transitive.
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I like to use the corresponding deck of cards on TinyCards in this situation--I figure it's made by the same company so they should match...(though they don't always!)
The TinyCards definition of "att räcka" is "to be enough".
You do not have a subject. If you put "maten" before the verb, it becomes a subject. "mat" after "inte" is the object of the sentence. The verb "räcka" means "to be enough", "to suffice".
I don't think, because the verb should be in second position. It sounds not correct.
That would mean "A lot of food is not enough", but there are several other reasons it doesn't work at all:
- mat is a mass noun so you need mycket
- mången is the singular en-word noun, so it's matched with tillräcklig without the t
- mången is largely archaic and should not be used, nor taught here
It's because you're trying to fit an adverb in there, like English does with "enough". But Swedish uses a verb instead, so maten räcker inte literally translates to "the food suffices not". And, as you can see, that follows the same grammar.
I do not understand the word order of this sentence. I began my attempt at translating it with Det finns inte but the accepted translation is nothing like that. Help!
I genuinely didn't, the app chose not to load any of these discussions >:( Thank you for pointing it out, it makes more sense now!
Yes, that is a very annoying and very common bug in the app, I'm afraid. :(
It reads just like its English counterpart "it suffices not food" would.
You can't have both finns and räcker at the same time - that'd be like saying "there exists suffices not food".
Could this also be translated as 'Det finns inte räcka mat' or because I'm using 'finns' does that mean i can't use the verb 'räcka' here but an adjective?
The latter - using both verbs would be like saying "there exists not suffices food" in English, so to speak.
Thanks! For some reason when I did this exercise earlier none of the comments that I can see (AND which answer all my questions) were visible - sorry for unintentionally wasting your time :-( .
Native speaker is saying that this sentence is wrong. The correct translation is "Det finns inte tillräckligt med mat."
That is, presumably, also accepted. The given sentence maten räcker inte is perfectly standard Swedish, though. It's a very common phrasing, and it corresponds very well to the given English translation.
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I tried this, but it was marked wrong: "Det är inte tillräckligt med mat." Can a native speaker help me understand what is wrong with this sentence?
Tack!
Roughly speaking, finns is about permanence and often is closer to "exists" than to just "is". So in this case, with food being very perishable, det är inte tillräckligt med mat would mean "that's not enough food" rather than "there is not enough food".
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Tack! Sorry for posing a question that was previously asked. Mysteriously, there were no forum entries for this exercise when I came here to ask my question.
No problem at all. It's a very annoying bug, one from which many suffer.
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Is there no more literal (as in "more literal", not "no more") translation from English (got "There is not enough food" -> "Maten räcker inte")? Comparing with German, I think there are some different nuances between the literal-to-english translations "Es gibt nicht genug Essen", "Es ist nicht genug Essen da" and the literal-to swedish "Das Essen reicht nicht". Like the difference between an active and a passive wording. The "es gibt" variant could also very well be referring to the whole world (in context or course), while the other two can only apply to a more specific situation. There is a literal (active) variant in English with "suffice" for "räcker", but at least to me that's a different meaning referring more to the quality of the food. Enough ranting :), how can I say that in Swedish without the food "actively" räckering?
Det finns inte tillräckligt med mat is the most direct one. The "translate into Swedish" exercises are generated automatically for the default answer in the "translate into English" exercise - so since the original Swedish is maten räcker inte, that is used.
It's like the German "Das Essen reicht nicht aus". So räcker inte = reicht nicht aus. Good to remember
räcka means "suffice", so that reads like "there exists the food suffices not".
Please see the other comments - that question has been answered several times in this thread.
Thank you for the reply. There must have been a bug in the program, because there were no comments visible when I typed the query.
räcker means "suffices", so that reads like "there suffices not food".
The general "there is" construction is always det finns rather than det är. At least I can't think of counterexamples.
Thank you!! Sorry for the repeated answer, think it is a bug on the app that the "discuss" section appeared empty for this question
No worries. :) Yeah, that's a common and very annoying bug. I don't mind at all. I know a lot of repeat questions are from people who have no way of knowing.
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Where's the word "food" gone in the Swedish sentence? Shouldn't it be Der räcker inte (med) mat? Det räcker inte is It is not enough.
Swedish prefers to phrase this as "The food suffices not". That's where the "food" went - it's at the start: maten.
One for the native speakers: Couldn't it be "det finns inte mat?" Thanks for your help!
räcka means "suffice", so that sounds like "It suffices not food."
Sure, that also works. You just skipped the med in your error report by accident, so that's why it wasn't accepted.
It's in the ending. As a word from the 'en' group, it gets a definite article in this form added: mat - food maten - the food (mat-en)
I wrote "Det finns inte räcker mat" but Duolingo marked it wrong. Why is this incorrect?
I'm confused as to why "maten" is used at the beginning of the sentence here. Also not sure why the definitive is used here and not just "mat". Would of thought the sentence to begin with "det finns".
Why can't I say "det räcker inte mat"? This sentence structure will be hard tk remember
Surely the translation into English is "The food is not enough" which does not necessarily mean the same as "There is not enough food"?
Shouldn't the sentence " There is not enough food be translated as"Det finns inte tillräckligt med mat."? I typed that in and it was marked wrong. I looked up the sentence. "Maten räcker inte." and it means "The food is not enough." So, how and why is my answer wrong? Anyone out there know? Just thought I'd ask.
Why is Det räcker inte mat" not acceptable? The given translation, when retranslated back to English sounds like "the food is not enough"; to me this means there should be something more/other than food, whereas the given English sentence was "there is not enough food". Which to me would mean there should be more food.
