"The cook is on vacation."
Translation:Kocken har semester.
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An interesting word. Does 'semester' goes for any kind of vacations - for pupils, students, employees? And what do swedes use for defining the semester of a school/university half-year? Tack in advance!
The semester at a university is called en termin in Swedish. The year is split into the vårtermin and hösttermin (spring term and autumn term) respectively.
The word semester will mean being on vacation from work, and thus it's used for the most part to refer to working people's vacation weeks. Students and pupils don't have semester, they have ledighet or they are lediga.
Semester can, however, sometimes mean going away on a trip somewhere, with less regard to whether or not the participants are employees somewhere. Then it's called åka på semester till Thailand, for example.
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(You can 'undertake an activity', but take care with the noun, because an undertaker is a funeral director.)
Hey, I would like to report a problem (or I do not know something). When I had for the first time "The cooks is on vacation" I answered "Kocken har semestern" and "Kocken är på semestern" and it showed me, that only second option is correct. For the second time it was the opposit - I marked only the second option and Duolingo showed that also the first was right. Can it be a problem with the programme?
If you answered har semestern or är på semestern, it’s wrong because it should be in the indefinite: semester. However, har semester and är på semester mean the same thing. So if you encounter a mistake in the course like that, you can report it using the report button → ”my answer should be accepted”.
I came across this word 'semester' for the first time now while strengthening the Travel skill. Is this a word added after I completed the coin or is it a bug? I've noticed it happening in other skills I go back to strengthen
It's a randomized selection of words each time you go through a lesson. It might happen that not every single word shows up, especially if you brush through it relatively unhindered.
I think the same did happen to me but I'm not sure. I can't always remember all the words shown to me before but I think I would have remembered this one as it's the exact opposite than the meaning of the word semester in Germany for university students. For us semester is the time of the year when lessons and other courses are and when it's not semester we have vacations (at least in theory).
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I think that sounds odd with no adverbial after it. If there's no where, with whom or when, I wouldn't use the verb semestrar.
Okay, I understand. I guess it's similar in English... You could say "The cook is vacationing in France," but generally not "The cook is vacationing."
Is semester really pronounced like /shemester/? Also, I often hear some words beginning with S pronounced /sh/. eg sig /shej/, sin /shin/, etc.
As my Swedish textbook explains it, all alveolar consonants ("n", "t", "d", "s", I guess "z" but it's not used in native Swedish words) become retroflex after "r" in Swedish, and the "r" is dropped. Of those, only retroflex "s" really sounds different from normal "s", to an English speaker, and it sounds (again, to an English speaker) like "sh". This happens both within and between words. So, "står" /står/ but "förstår" /föshtår/ and "semester" /semester/ but "har semester" /ha shemester/. A similar process occurs in casual speech in many dialects of English where, "n" becomes "ŋ" (the "ng" sound) before "c"/"k" or "g", for instance, "incapable" /iŋkeipəbl/ and "in golf" /iŋ gaŀf/.
This is a link to a Youtube video on the 'sj' sound and when it is used. Actually this channel is really good for phonetics, pronunciation, accents and stress etc.
