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- "I like coffee but I love tea…
"I like coffee but I love tea."
Translation:Jag tycker om kaffe men jag älskar te.
27 Comments
This is perhaps my single most useful sentence since moving to Sweden :)
1337
utan can be
1 a preposition meaning 'without': Jag dricker te utan socker 'I drink tea without sugar'
2 a conjunction which carries the meaning 'not X but Y', and then there must be a negation before it: Jag dricker inte kaffe, utan te 'I am not drinking coffee, but tea'.
"Jag har inte äpple, utan apelsin"- I don't have an apple, but an orange. "Hon ritar en elefant, men elefanten är lila!"- She draws an elephant, but the elephant is purple! Do you see the difference?
- 1337
No, you can leave it out after coordinating conjunctions such as och ('and') and men ('but'). This works roughly the same way in Swedish and English.
- 69
to like,to fancy.gillar - Englisch-Übersetzung - bab.la Schwedisch-Englisch Wörterbuch http://de.bab.la/woerterbuch/schwedisch-englisch/gillar
I made this same mistake. I am not quite sure, but I suspect that because 'men' is not introducing a subordinate clause here, but rather an independent sentence, we would use the "standard" word order '...jag älskar te.' Hopefully someone can confirm for us!
Correct! Or, rather, it's not an independent sentence but an independent phrase. The same logic applies, though.
Tala and gilla are the invinitive verb forms, which means they are not conjugated (to like, to speak). Most languages distinguish between an infinitive form and a conjugated form. The principle is that every grammatical person, singular and plural, requires the verb to be conjugated respectively. In English this is very simplified and we only have the third person singular simple present S (I go, you go, he/she/it goes) and the conjugatios of to be (infinitive form), which are highly irregular compared to the rest: I am, you are, he/she/it is... As I said before, most languages require the verb to change form for every grammatical person. In Swedish, most infinitives end with an -a or an -e, and all grammatical persons share the same conjugation, which in 90% is constructed by simply ading an -r.
You might now wonder: If the verb needs to be conjugated anyway so why then learn the infinitive forms? Simple: Modal verbs. Modal verbs change the meaning of the verb. Do you see the difference between I run through the park and I like to run through the park? In this case, like is the modal verb an refers to some action I like, in this case to run. To run in turn has to be in its infinitive form. Here are the same sentences in Swedish: Jag springer genom parken and Jag tycker om att springa genom parken.
One last word about infinitives: If you're learning systematically and have some sort of vocabulary booklet, then it probably won't hurt you writing down both the infinitive and the conjugated form of the verb, simply because of the few exceptions where you can't tell either of the form by knowing only one of them.
I believe that the phrase goes "tycker om", that is the actual function of the om, to work together with tycker. This is what I understood, at least
- 1337
There's some more about word order and tycker om in this post too: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/5892480
Why do you use "om" before kaffe but not before "te"? I said "Jag tycker om kaffe men jag alsakar om te" and it was wrong :/
Because the "om" is a part of "tycker om", it has nothing to do with the coffee. After älskar there's no "om".
