26 Comments
What is the expression in Swedish for great grandparents, does it work on the same principle, eg farmormor, farmorfar etc
You can say farmorsfar, mormorsmor etc, but notice the little S that appear between the second and third part of the word.
Another word is gammel + farmor/mormor/farfar/morfar, e.g. This term is ambiguous though, as it's not entirely clear exactly whose morfar he is. Is it the morfar of your parent or your own morfar's parent? Usually context will tell though.
I learned it as gamla, not gammel, but that could just differ based on who you ask.
And as an extra bit of info, gamla (or gammel) means old. So when you say gamla farmor/mormor/farfar/morfar, you are really saying old(er) grandma/grandpa.
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That does not sound right in English. You need to say My paternal grandfather if you are going to use that expression.
I wrote "the grandfather likes fish and lemon" but it turns wrong and the correct answer was " my grandfather likes fish and lemon"!! Is that a bug?! If no, where is the" min"?!
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The main translation, as you can see above, is Grandfather likes fish and lemon. Both in Swedish and in English, if you just say Farfar or Grandfather, we will assume that you are talking about your own one. In English, they tend to use my a bit more often than we would in Swedish, so that's also an accepted answer. But the grandfather isn't a natural way of speaking about your own grandfather in English, and the Swedish sentence doesn't have him in the determinate form either, so that answer cannot be accepted.
The machine picks from all accepted answers and shows you the one it thinks is closest to what you input.
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Maybe it's grammatical, but it sounds very odd. "Grandfather" is much more commonly said in English.
In Sweden, do you give names to your grandparents like we do in America? (ie, I call my grandparents on my mother's side Nana and Papa, while I call my grandparents on my fathers side Grandma and Grandpa.)
No, we call our granparents on our father side fathers father and fathers mother and on our motjers side mothers father and mothers mother (farfar,farmor,mormor and morfar.)
- Farfar = fars far = father's father = grandfather on father's side.
- Morfar = mors far = mother's father = grandfather on mother's side.
You can see the whole family tree here: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/5667610
The sentence feels weird to me, I think it's that I'm interpreting Grandfather as a proper noun here.
Oh Sweden, you're so optimistic. "Tycker om" directly (word-for-word) translates you "thinks if" (or "thinks of" if you want to refine it a bit), even though it means "like." In the direct translation, you are assuming that you like someone when you think about them, meaning that if you don't like someone, you just don't think about them.
"Tycker om" doesn't mean "think of" in the sense of just thinking about someone, it means "think of" in the sense of having an opinion about something. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say it had something to do with how you can "think well of" something, but that's purely a guess on my part.
What is wrong with me that I keep forgetting things like the difference between like/likes when translating back into English (my L1).
It's strange: I've put "Farfar tycker om fisk och citron" and the system tells me: Correct solution: Farfar tycker om fisk och citron. It's pretty the same to me, I think... It's a pity I lost points because of this.
I was luckier today: I translated Är hon hennes mormor? as Is she her grandmother? and it was accepted, although I was told that "another correct solution" would be Is she her grandmother? ;-)
