- Forum >
- Topic: Swedish >
- "The palace is downtown."
"The palace is downtown."
Translation:Palatset ligger i centrum.
26 Comments
1450
Hints are just hints, you can't expect every hint to be accepted everywhere. It's odd to say that a building is located på stan, we would expect the preposition i, and i sta(de)n is not the same as på stan so that doesn't fit either.
1450
If you say you met someone på stan, it corresponds well to 'downtown' or 'in the city center', but more colloquial. We also often use it in the combination gå på stan to say, well, 'going downtown' or 'going to the city center', maybe for shopping or fika or so. You can also say that a person is på stan, well I see I already sort of mentioned that. i staden on the other hand just means 'in the town/city' in a neutral way, and includes the whole town/city, which på stan does not. You're not på stan if you're in some residential area with no shops for instance, even though you are i staden.
So I'd say på stan is pretty much a special expression for a fairly restricted set of situations.
1450
You'll already know fika when you get to it in the tree then, there's quite a lot of that going on in our course :)
We like to claim that fika is a cultural institution so this wikipedia article about it is good.
Fika på stan is very Swedish. You'll sound like a native in no time.
205
Please could someone (looks hopefully to Devalanteriel) answer this? A couple of sentences earlier, where the palace is outside the capital, my står was accepted, but not here. I know I'm biased, as buildings usually stand in German, my mother tongue. But I'm confused as to why the palace can stand outside the city but lies inside it.
1450
mitt i is like 'in the middle of' in English – mitt actually means 'middle' too. So mitt i stan is like 'in the middle of town', which is a lot like 'downtown'.
They use the same distinction in the Danish course (castle = slot, palace = palads) and I always get it wrong.
I checked the Swedish royal court site and "Drottningholms slott" is called Drottningholm Palace in English (Gripsholms slott is Gripholm Castle though).
It is says here that a "palats" is supposed to have an urban environment and no garden and for a "slott" the opposite holds. This means for example that Stockholms Slott is not a "slott" but a "palats". I give up :)!
461
I always learned (40+ years ago when I lived in Sth) that "downtown" translated to "på stan". "Mitt på stan" doesn't seem right, nor does "centrum" (yes, I've read the questions/comments here). Ah, well.
Let's be honest. The Royal Palace that is in the middle of Stockholm is not called "palatset" by the locals, it's called kungliga slottet. So why is slottet marked down? Another grumble: Downtown is strictly American English and I've never been entirely clear what it means. The bad part of town? The built up part of town? All I know for sure is it's where the police station is! In Australian English we would say "go into town" or "go to the city centre" or something like that. Brits also refer to "the high street". All in all, this question (and the narrow range of accepted answers) seems both overly strict and context dependent.
2174
✅ "Palatset ligger i centrum."
❌ "palatset ligger i centrum."
I'm Duolingo. I delegate major functionality to interns.