"Vi försöker bestämma oss."

Translation: We are trying to decide.

[CrazyChao]

What purpose does oss serve here?

[Hinterlady]

Does the ending -stämma mean anything in particular? I have seen it appear in several recent vocabulary words.

[dyvosvit]

Why "we try to decide ourselves' is wrong here?

[Arnauti]

That would be Vi försöker bestämma själva – the sentence we have here, Vi försöker bestämma oss has a somewhat different meaning, more like make up our minds than decide for ourselves.

[LeonardoAn102100]

I am enjoyng how much of swedish is like german - "bestämma sig" is pretty much "sich entscheiden". Maybe its because Hochdeutsch was the medieval lingua franca in the region?

[DerrickMcClure1]

No, it's just because they are both Germanic languages - Swedish is of the North Germanic sub-family, German of the West Germanic.

[TwiceyHM]

In portuguese people often say "se decida" or "decida-se" (which is the correct one, but some people say "se decida" anyways), which would literally mean "bestämmer sig".

[ezupo1]

it is the same in Spanish, we have......Decidir and the reflexive Decidirse

[StephDegr]

Same in french "se decider".. so maybe it's same for every language except english ;p

[Solo_BUNI]

I had not really been able to catch at all the reflexives until your post. Take my lingots! Thankyou! :D

[James704885]

Where is the list of every verb that requires things like SIG, MIG and OSS?

[Matt630291]

no, portuguese, spanish, french are mainly Latin based. For those and Italian it should be about same

[LauraLaube]

Czech is a Slavonic language and also uses a reflexive pronoun in this case . Rozhodnout se. It may be more semantically sound rather than related to a family of languages... English seems to be an exception here. If someone else decides for you in an authoritative (law) or power (enemy) or protective (parent) position than it is not reflexive, too.