"I generally trust the staff."
Translation:Jag litar i allmänhet på personalen.
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I didn't want to report as a problem as I am genuinely not sure if this is correct, but I put "Jag litar på personelen i allmänhet", which I would think is equivalent to "I trust the staff, generally"/"I trust the staff, in general", in English? Is this right?
Somebody reported this option but I didn't accept it because I don't think it means the same thing. I'd say Jag litar på personalen i allmänhet means 'I trust the staff in general' in the sense 'I trust the staff in general, but maybe not person X in the staff', whereas 'I generally trust the staff' and Jag litar i allmänhet på personalen mean that I generally, usually, most often trust the staff.
Wow, that's a very subtle difference that would normally only be clear given the context - at least in American English from my experience as a native English speaker and author.
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Languages which have a more flexible word order, use the word order to emphasize. Generally, but not always,, the last word is emphasized such as in Latin or Russian
In English you may emphasize the word but not changing the word order
Kind of
YOU are my brother Frater meus est tu
You ARE my brother Frater meus tu est
You are MY brother Tu esr frater meus
You are my BROTHER Tu est meus frater
I wish I could provide Swedish exemple. When word order is flexible, it is not just the same, it is normally used to emphasize these different meanings
I'm guessing because it literally translates as "I trust in general..."
I get stuck on this part of Swedish every time. The V2 part makes sense but structuring the sentence after that is a mess.
Your sentence is good and the meaning is pretty close. But although generally usually can be replaced by usually it is not possible in general :)
To expand, generally sounds like it's based on circumstance, while usually sounds like it's based on occurrence.
So, is litar på a set phrase like tycker om? Can we make litar på sandwiches by sticking an adverb in the middle like we can with tycker om?
Neither is a set phrase - but they're both phrasal verbs. :) And as such, anything that qualifies the verb (usually adverbs) is put inbetween.
I wrote 'I allmänhet litar jag personalen'. I am not sure what wrong. I tried to have the first part of the sentence with the subject, followed by the verb.
Could someone explain why it is wrong?
Thanks you
The verb is "lita på". The particle "på" belongs to the verb and is always needed.
Just for clarity maybe we should say that på is not a particle here, it's a preposition. You're right of course that it's always necessary. Some verbs cannot take a direct object, only a prepositional object. An English example is 'listen'. You always listen to things, you cannot just 'listen a song' for instance.
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I don't mean to sound angry but to me it was clearly an oversight to forget the "på" here and the question was more focus on the placement of "i allmänhet" but that part has been left unanswered. This happens a lot to the question on the Swedish forum I've noticed and then it derails without getting a clear answer...
So could someone please answer to why "i allmänhet litar jag på personalen" or "i allmänhet jag litar på personalen" is wrong? I have tried both...
We actually do accept i allmänhet litar jag på personalen. I see you left an error report, which is great. Your report says liter, so it's just a typo, but it's a different word so that's why it wasn't account.
i allmänhet jag litar på personalen is incorrect because it violates the v2 rule by putting the verb in third position.
I translated the phrase to "jag litar på personalen i allmänhet" so i was wondering if "i allmenhet" has to be in the third place and only there.
It should go in third place, since it is a satsadverbial 'sentence adverbial' which modifies the whole sentence. Those tend to go in that place (technically it's called the fourth place but the third place is empty in this sentence so it's number three in this case).
If you put it last, it will not modify the whole sentence, only the word before it, and then the meaning of the sentence will change.
Jag litar i allmänhet på personalen means you "most often" trust the staff
Jag litar på personalen i allmänhet means you trust "most of the staff"
Note. Satsadverbial can also go in first place, so I allmänhet litar jag på personalen is also fine.
Thanks for this great explication, it really helps!However, it raises another question for me. You say that in this sentance the satsadverbial is in the fourth place and the third place is empty. What sorts of things could go into the third place of such a sentence?
I think this is very confusing for an English speaker since wherever you put "in general " in the sentence in English, it'd mean "most of the staff " and we'd use "most often" if that were the required meaning...wouldn't Swedish use something like "oftaste" to express "more often "?
Wouldn't "förtror" be correct here as well? I knew quite a bit of Swedish before using Duolingo, so I don't always follow the 'rules', but I would like to know if it's wrong or not.
No, it does not work. There is the verb "anförtro", that means "to entrust [with something].
Didn't know that word yet. Thanks! I was fairly certain the verb förtro existed, but apparently it's only nouns like förtroende and förtrolighet (as Google told me). I learned a new thing today :D
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"Jag litar i allmänhet på allmänheten" is a valid construction ? (I mean, not in this specific case, but in general)
would "i generally do not trust the staff" be: "Jag litar inte i allmänhet på personalen" ?
That works technically but sounds a bit off. Jag litar i allmänhet inte på personalen is much better. :)
Is this because inte needs to go inside the litar på sandwich? (akin to the tycker om sandwich)
Yes and no. It's inside the phrasal verb in Dusan's example as well. But it can't go after inte because inte is the word being affected.
Just to confirm, the word being affected goes inside the phrasal verb, as written by Dusan and Duo?
The word affecting the phrasal verb goes inside of it, yes. And hence, any words affecting the affecting word also go inside.
So does this translate to "I trust, in general, on the staff" or "I trust generally on the staff?"
Neither; it translates to "I generally trust the staff." Verbs come second, then adverbs. Lita på is a two-word verb, so the på here does not mean "on".
Is it a rule to invert verb and subject whenever the sentence starts with an adverb?
Well, the rule is that the verb must go in second place (in all main clauses that are not questions). This rule is called V2. So whatever you put first in the sentence, the verb must go right after it.
can someone remind me what was the meaning of tror jag det? cant we use it here?
I failed with "Jag litar generellt på personalen." Can someone please explain the role of "sett" in the solution "Jag litar generellt sett på personalen."? How is "generellt" distinct from "generellt sett"? Thanks in advance.
The phrase "generellt sett" is somewhat of a fixed expression meaning "generally".
I just realized 3 quarters of the way through that I don't understand the word order. Why is this wrong: på Personalen litar i allmänhet jag.
It's not impossible per se. It would mean In the staff the one who generally trusts is me – it would put a strong and strange emphasis on jag that would lead me to believe that it was expected that someone should always be trusting the staff, and usually I'm the one who's doing it.
Another strange but possible word order would be På personalen litar jag i allmänhet – this should be followed up with men inte på gästerna – 'I generally trust THE STAFF, but not the guests'. This could also be said as Personalen litar jag i allmänhet på, which sounds more natural.
The idea is that only things that your Swedish teacher would want you to say should be accepted answers in Swedish, so not all "not wrong per se" answers are accepted answers. (things that sound unnatural or require very specific contexts should not be accepted)
I'm not 200% certain of the theory behind it, but I believe that the subject and verb should stand next to each other. So "jag litar" or "litar jag". So that would make "på personalen litar jag i allmänhet". That's not all of the theory behind this sentence, but the only bit I'm relatively certain of :p
I wrote "Jag i allmänhet litar på personalen" . Could someone guide me to understanding why this structure is incorrect. I often need an explanation to adjust my path of thinking/translating. Thanks!
V2 rule: the verb needs to be in the second position, which in this case is immediately after the subject.
I wrote, "Jag litar i allmänhet på personalen." Marked wrong. Am I missing something? Maybe a glitch? Reported 2.24.19.
Thanks! I see your report and it's marked as correct in the admin interface, meaning the system screwed something up. It's actually very rare to get such a report - usually, there are errors the user missed - so I'm thrilled to get something I can actually forward to the developers.
Follow-up: If it's not too much trouble, could you please provide the following information?
- what platform you're on (e.g. iPhone, desktop browser)
- what type of exercise it was
- whether the exercise used tiles
If "I allmänhet litar jag på personalen" were an option would that also be correct?
I’m pretty sure that’s grammatically correct, but then you’ve changed the order of the wording to “Generally, I trust the staff.”
That's correct, though we actually do accept that word order here.
"allmänhet" is a noun—the "-het" suffix is related to German "-heit" and English "-hood", and, from the adjective "allmän", meaning public or generic, forms something like "public-hood", "generic-hood", i.e. the state of being those things. So "i allmänhet" is analogous to "in the general case".
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Is the reason we use "i allmänhet" instead of "generellt", is that the former adverb focuses it as more of "general rule"? Meaning the above translation would read more precisely as "As a general rule I trust my staff."? Sorry, for all the questions, but as I get deeper in the sessions, I'm think I"m starting to understand the naunces of Swedish grammar. It's my first other language, so it's been difficult, with how these different rules. ;-)
We accept both here, but I'm not really sure why I'd prefer one over the other. Maybe it's mostly idiomatics.
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UGH! The word order is killing me .................. Is there any other word order possibility or is the answer given the only possibility?
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I thought that "Jag brukar litar på personalen" should be accepted. But I suppose that is the subtle difference between "generally" and "usually" in both languages. Lesson learned.
