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- "Förstår du boken?"
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As a native English speaker trying to learn new languages, I am truly starting to hate the English 'do-support' system. That may be the hardest thing for me personally to overcome with getting the grammar in other languages to stick.
står = stand förstår = understand
is there a linguistic explanation behind the fact that both languages have this same progression from "stand" to "understand"?
Germanic wordplay, I guess. German does that too: stehen <--> verstehen
Don't know about swedish, but in german "ver" is signalling a motion away, meaning you are (figuratively) standing further away from a thing and see it in its entirety.
English likes to do their own thing so you stand under something instead, but the idea seems the same.
"Are you understanding the book?" was not accepted and while somewhat clumsy I believe it an acceptable translation.
I don’t think a verb such as understand is very often used progressively.
"I don't believe that you are understanding what I am saying." I am nonetheless grateful for the Swedish addition to duolingo. Thank you for your response and contributions.
How do you know when to add the "do" in english? I read it literally as "Understand you the book?". Is it just with practice that you know to add a "do" and switch the order of "you" and "understand" or do you just realize that it doesn't make sense translated literally or what?
In colloquial speech, English speakers often drop the "do" in questions that do not have another question word like who, what, when, where, why, or how.
"Who does that remind you of?"
"What do you like?"
"When do they go to school?"
"Where does the train stop?"
"How do you fix a car?"
"Why did the dog growl at me?"
The "do" forms attached to these question words cannot be omitted, not in colloquial speech, and definitely not in writing.
However --- "You remember that?" or "You understand?" are acceptable in conversation. In fact, some people only use the "do" for these kinds of questions to show their displeasure, seriousness, or sometimes impatience. "DO you understand?" or "DO I make myself clear?" are good examples of how the proper forms of "do" are added back to colloquial speech to suit the context. Also, a teacher might say, "You forgot your homework?" after the first offense, but an annoyed teacher might say, "DID you forget your homework again?" after the second or third offense.
There is no instance where you may drop the "do" in writing, only in speech.
1487
It's the standard way of creating questions in English. In Swedish, we do it by putting the verb first instead.
It did not accept did you understand the book ? What would the translation be for that ?
- 1487
Förstod du boken? – 'did' is the past tense, but 'do' is the present tense so they have different translations.
It's complicated for me to switch the u from "du" to the u from "boken"
Du has like a French u
Whilst boken has a normal o like the English oo in book.
Switching from one word to another is a tongue twister for me.
Hence when I want to say the whole sentence, then I can't say it correctly, it's complicated.
