"What is your profession?"
Translation:Vad är ditt yrke?
29 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
I've just started taking Swedish lessons in Malmö, and today we learnt "Vad har du för yrke?", which seems to be exactly the same thing.
Is there any real difference between them? Or is the way I learnt it just using more words than needed?
EDIT: Or would what I learnt be more "What do you have as a profession?"
karriär is 'career'. I found this page about the difference between the two: http://pediaa.com/difference-between-career-and-profession/
Thanks for the link! By the definitions and examples given, I don't see any real concrete difference. The link also says that that they are often used interchangeably. As a native speaker I can think of a couple of stock phrases where I would use one and not the other, but mostly I would use them interchangeably. I guess I just have to memorize the Swedish phrase a specific way. Thanks again!
Vad is a question word (meaning what) and it is the same for both en and ett words. Vart is a question word as well, but with a different meaning - where, as in "Vart går du?" (="Where are you going?").
A very funny fun fact: the question word var also means where, but in the sense of location (i.e. where someone or something is), while vart means where in the sense of direction (i.e. where someone, or possibly something, is headed to) :)
That would mean "Which is your profession?" or, more in the spirit of the English language, "Which profession is yours?", as opposed to "What is your profession?" (which is what Duo is asking us to translate in this task).
One might say that English speakers are rather sloppy in usage of which and what in questions. You can often hear people asking, for example, "What bike is yours?" while pointing at a row of bikes parked on the street, when in such cases "Which bike is yours?" would have been more suitable. Asking "which bike" implies that the querier is looking at a series of bikes and wants to know which one of them is yours. Asking "what bike" has a more general meaning, i.e. it doesn't limit the one who's answering to a certain group of bikes.
Finally, all my explanatory efforts notwithstanding, a confirmation or a correction by a native or just a very fluent speaker (of which I am neither) is always welcome!
There are subtle differences between the three. For example, accounting is a profession. It can take years to become an accountant. Also, after you are an accountant you have to continually work at staying up-to-date with changes in the field.
A job, on the other hand, doesn't require years of training or staying up-to-date with changes in the field. A store clerk would be an example of a job.
Work is more of what you do at your place of employment.
It would be REALLY awesome if Duo would put a little (pl) after you/r since in English there's literally no way to know from just reading the sentence how many 'you's' there are. In this case, singular & plural are both acceptable to Duo, but it seems like there have been several occasions when it was one or the other, but there was no way to know which one until the answer was marked wrong.