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- "This year is the year of the…
"This year is the year of the dog."
Translation:I år är det hundens år.
95 Comments
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It is from the Chinese now year cycle..,but any sentence can usually be turned. I tried with "det är hundens år i år" Is that phrase really wrong in Swedish?
My guess is no, it's okay, but they just don't like it if you rearrange the sentence
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The question is whether it sounds natural to a native speaker's ear, in order to validify whether anyone would use a sentence of such an arrangement. And to me, as a German speaker, it does not sound natural in my native tongue either. »Es ist das Jahr des Hundes, dieses Jahr«, translating it literally. It sounds redundant at the end, and utterly awkward. If I were a moderator of either language, I wouldn't accept it as I never spoke myself this way.
Just my two cents.
It is like saying "This year, it is the year of the dog." It's phrased slightly differently than the English way. In English, we make "year" the subject instead of "it." Det comes after är because there is an adverb at the beginning of the sentence and the verb must stay in second position.
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So, without "I år", it would be "Det är hundens år". Yes, it makes sense. Tack så micket
But why can't 'det' just be left out? Like 'this year is the dog's year.
I came into this discussion section because I had the same question like above but thanks to your answer i realised that in Polish I also would have said "Ten rok TO rok psa" which is literally "I år är DET hundens år." This is what happens when you start thinking i the language you are using, not your native ;)
I sometimes have the same. Direct translation to Dutch is then easier than translation to English
So "det" reffers back to "är" instead of "år"... it actually makes a lot of sense, I thought "I år" was the subject and "det" referred to "år", making it "det hundens året", which was the epicenter of my doubt over why is "år" indefinite. So, could you phrase it "I år är det det hundens året"?
I said "Det här året är året av hunden", and not until my answer was marked incorrect did I intuit that "i år" is a similar construction to "ikväll" (tonight) or "i morgon" (tomorrow).
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Isn't it a great feeling when the coin drops though? Even if you need a few clues first.
It's interesting that you don't have an expression like 'to-year' in English :)
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Actually I find it terribly frustrating - that feeling of "I know this rule/sentence construction, why didn't I think of it BEFORE I wrote but after I already made the error".
You're not supposed to pick the coin back up after it drops. :p
Why "I år är det hundens år" and not "hundens året" since it's "the year"?
think like the English language, you say "the year" of the dog, but not the dog's "the year". Swedish doesn't really like the construct of "the x of the y", so they almost always use "the y's x", from what i read around this site (:
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Just saw the answer to that in another thread: you don't use a definite form after a possessive because that's like saying "the dog's the year".
So can we say "detta år är det hundens år"? Or "det här är det hundens år"? Tack för svaret.
Yes, I was wondering the same, but I'd rather say "detta år är hundens år" or "det här året är hundens år". I think that in this case detta år/det här året is already the subject, so we don't need "det".
I feel so inadequate ... I have basically been studying Swedish for about 8 weeks! Practising almost every day, but this really threw me for a loop!
Well, don't be discouraged - eight weeks is still the baby steps phase. I'm sure you'll get the hang of it! :)
Same here. I also study Swedish on Sfi in Sweden and work with their materials on my own, it's been 3 months of Sfi and Duolingo together and additional month of Duolingo only and I still don't get simplest things in the store, especially at the register. They always ask me something like 'is thar all' but I can't depict words. It's a hard language.
I really think the English version of the sentence should be revised to be "It is the year of the dog, this year." or "This year, it's the year of the dog." ... Right now, it throws a lot of us off by pretending that "this year" is the subject, whilst it's actually an adverb in the Swedish solution.
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Does it also make sense to say "I år är året av hunden"? Or is it more grammatically correct to have it be the possessive of the dog ("hundens år")?
Exactly - we don't have the "of" possessive construction that English does.
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I flipped it by typing "Det är hundens år i år", which is correct. It's a matter of style, I suppose.
It's a perfectly fine sentence, just a matter of the course generally trying not to change sentence construction too much. That's partially because a specific construction is occasionally being taught, but also partially because the manual labour in adding additional constructions in a lot of places would become hard to manage very quickly.
Since the construction is different than the English: This year is the year of the dog, I think "Det är i år hundens år" seems to match, but it marked it wrong. Why should I år come before det when there was no placement of "det" or "it" in the original?
That construction is perfectly grammatical - it just isn't a natural word order at all in Swedish. So it's correct but too unidiomatic to accept.
Still can't understand why why need the "det". Why can't we just say "I år är hundens år". Can someone please explain it to me like I'm 5 ??
Swedish, just like English, always needs a grammatical subject, that's the whole of it. "I år" is an adverb, then comes the verb, then the subject.
They way this is written in swedish shows the possession of the dogs, while english the posession lies with year and dogs is used as a descriptive adjective.
Actually, that's wrong. The "ownership" of the year by the dog (not dogs) is expressed in Swedish by a genitive, that is, a grammatical case, whereas in English by a preposition ("of"). "Dog" cannot be seen as an adjective here, exactly for the reason that there is a preposition referring to it. It could be in a sentence like "the dog year".
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I think I might be missing something obvious here, sorry about that. I felt like it should be "I år är den hundens år", with den instead of det.
The pronoun doesn't actually refer to hundens - nor to år. It's just a general "it", so it defaults to the neuter.
Is there also animal's year in Sweden such as China? The china's animal year is below. (rat-cow-tiger-rabbit-dragon-snake-horse-sheep-monkey-hen-dog-pig)
But there is actually a saying in Swedish, "hundår", a dog's year, meaning a very hard year. "Jag jobbade två år som skogshuggare. Det var riktiga hundår!"
Maybe this sentence is referring more about Chinese customs in Swedish
No, not at all. If you take this sentence as a real sentence, it must be referring to Chinese traditions.
Det här året är det hundens år....I read the English with an emphasis on the words "this year" as distinguished from another. How am I wrong?
You're not, though it's a less likely interpretation. I've added it now.
Tack...It's what I'd tell my son when he insists it's the year of the dragon...
Swedish doesn't put the definite after a possessive. English does the same for "the x's y" constructions: you say "the dog's year" but not "the dog's the year".
det här triggers definite, while detta triggers indefinite. Hence:
- det här året
- detta år
Does "Året" mean "the year". The sentence in English is "this year is the year of the dog". Translation sopposed to be "I år är det hundens året" not "I år är det hundens år."
No. After possessives of any kind the substantive takes always the indefinite form.
I am resorting to mathmatics to remember some of this terms. So, I came up with a formula to remember the "the year of the dog" or anything similar to that. The formula is: a b = the b of the a (a = genitive words, b = any words) So by this formula we can see that hundens(a) år(b) = the year(b) of the dog(a)
You just formulated what a genitive is in most instances (the possessive case).
Yes, perfect, but you may be interested in learning that his name is I-or in Swedish. :)
Using standard Swedish pronunciation, so pretty much the same as in English but with a Swedish r.
I as the vowel in the English word "see", and or as the "or" in e.g. the English "lorry", but with a Swedish r instead.
Thanks! ( very much considering watching Swedish I-or videos now instead of working :-) )
What throws me why it is hundens not hunden . Isn't hundens the dog's while hunden is the dog.then you throw in år and är and my head is spinning
English can express the possessive in two ways:
- the x of the y - the year of the dog
- the y's x - the dog's year
But Swedish only has the second option, so whenever you have "the x of the y" in English, you must translate it into the second option in Swedish.
I don't really understand the rest of your question, but regarding "hundens" it's just that simple: hunden=the dog, hundens=of the dog.
Stange construction for me. So "det" refers to the year, not the dog (otherwise it'd be den). Can I say:
"Det här år är hundens år"? Tack.
Yes, det refers to the year. It's a bit like if English had said "this year, it is the year of the dog", where "it" would have referred to the year.
Your suggestion works but det här triggers the definite, så: det här året är hundens år. It's not nearly as idiomatic, though.
Swedish doesn't put the definite after a possessive. English does the same for "the x's y" constructions: you say "the dog's year" but not "the dog's the year".
It appears to me (native English speaker) this sentence is constructed "this year is the dog's year". Would this sentence be portrayed the same way if it wasn't referring to the Chinese calendar? For instance, "this is My year!"
It's more like "This year, it is the dog's year", technically speaking, but you're right: that's a very idiomatic phrasing.
The possessive is inherently definite and hence doesn't take the definite form. It's the same in the direct English possessive, where you wouldn't say "the dog's the year" but just "the dog's year".
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I wrote: i år är det året hundens.... instead of hundens år. Duolingo didn't like it, but do I sound like an idiot to a Swede?
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I think the German expression for "i år" is "heuer" which means this year. But i have still a problem with the "det" I translated the sentece with Google translate and the answer was without "det". But I know Google is not the Bible.
Swedish uses det as the default for the general "it" whenever there is no introduced en-word subject. This is consistent across the language and across the course.
I put "det hundens år," but if it were an "en" word like "mat" instead of an "ett" word like "år" you would use "den" instead of "det," right? So it would be "den hundens mat"? And whether the posessive in the phrase ("hundens," in this example) is an "ett" or "en" word doesn't affect whether it's "det" or "den," correct? Also, what (det/den/etc.) would you use if it were paired with a plural noun?
This is a general "it is..." construction, so it'd still use det since Swedish always defaults to that. It'd have been i dag är det hundens dag, for instance, even though dag is an en-word. The it doesn't actually refer to the year / day.
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Why is it "är det" rather than "det är"? I would have thought the latter made it a statement and the former a question ("this year, is it the year of the dog?"). Given that the former is correct, how would I make it into the aforementioned question?
v2 rule - the verb wants to come second, and the prepositional phrase i år is the first unit. A question would have put the verb first: är det hundens år i år?
That means "it's the dog's year", but the Swedish sentence says "it's the dog's year this year", basically.
The verb needs to go second, and i år counts as the first unit. So it needs to be i år är det...
This is confusing me, i thought that neither "är" nor "det" were verbs.
är is probably the most common verb form in the Swedish language. It is the present tense of the verb vara, meaning to be. So it means am / are / is.
