"Sådant är livet!"
Translation:Such is life!
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963
EVen better: here is is with Swedish lyrics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZMOnW35WKU
Haha - Dean, I actually have this (the Swedish phrase) as a decal on my car in Ikea font to send up the bogans who always get this in English in that calligraphy script.
- 420
This is great, in previous sentence "Aldrig i livet" I'm required to write "never in my life", but here "my" is wrong, how can I know where Swedish replaces possessiveness with definite article and where doesn't?
You've got to remember that they don't want the English and Swedish to "match" each other. They want the English phrase to be correct, and the NEAREST Swedish phrase, to also be correct. So "such is my life" is wrong because that is not what we say in English. We say "such is life". It's an idiom, and can't be "such is the life" or "such is my life" or "such is one's life". It's just "such is life". But in Swedish it's "Sådant är livet", which is not a LITERAL translation, but it's just what is said. The same goes for "aldrig i livet". In English we say "Never in my life...", we would never ever said "Never in the life..." (unless more followed that, but that's a super specific situation that doesn't have the same meaning). What I am saying is, both languages require the idiomatic phrase rather than the translation.
- 420
Thank you for your explanation. I will try to keep that in mind. The problem can be that sometimes I don't know whether a word-by-word translation or idiomatic translation is required. I read in some other comments that Duolingo does a lot of things good but not these idiomatic sentences. There should be some warning or information in case of idiomatic sentences so that I know that. Maybe admins of the course could add something like "(idiom)" at the end of those sentences.