"You have a visitor."

Translation: Du har besök.

[Sven-Ska]

I had just been reading about "Jag har bil" and how you do not need an indefinite article so I tried to write "Du har besökare" ... and it turns out I do have to put in the EN besökare. I'm so confused.

[Arnauti]

Literally besök is 'visit', which makes the prepositionless expression 'ha besök' a bit more logical (more like lyssna på radio and ha bil).
You can say Du har besökare, only that would mean 'You have visitors'.

[CapdeBurro]

Are nouns defining people and ending with "are" all neutral?

[Arnauti]

They're all common gender, at least I can't think of any exceptions.

[CapdeBurro]

So how can besökare be plural then?

[Arnauti]

That's just how they work. It's mentioned here: https://www.duolingo.com/skill/sv/Plurals

They all work like this:
en besökare, besökaren
besökare, besökarna

[devalanteriel]

Yeah, that'd confuse me, too... I think jag har bil can be considered idiomatic. For most phrases, you do need an article. But there are lots of exceptions, and I believe most of them match the English ones - e.g. names of diseases.

[g-puddlejumper]

what is the difference between besök and gäst?

[ion1122]

besökare = visitor;
gäst = guest;
besök = visit

[RolfHemmin]

Why don't you accept "besökande" which is what you asked for= visitor

[ion1122]

The problem with accepting a literal translation is that Swedish and English idiom is different in this case. English says "You have a visitor", but Swedish says, literally, "You have visit".

I think it would be a mistake here (from a pedagogical point of view) for DL to accept a literal translation of the English, for then you would not be aware of the difference in idiom.

[SusanEvans99456]

My keyboard will not write this, I have tried 3 times but as soon as I type the o (with umlaut) of besok the e of en disappears. It has never happened before.It has never happened to any other sentence.

[MARK877133]

I am new but I believe that is a sign that the program expects a different answer. It posts enough spaces to accept the correct answer. I think that it would be better to have the suffix -"are" added to "besök" to denote a person but apparently both can be "visitor." The "en" is not wanted apparently which makes me ledsen but what do I know.

[ion1122]

Mark, the word "besökare" means "visitor". The word "besök "means "visit", not "visitor".

However, instead of saying "You have a visitor", the idiomatic phrase in Swedish is literally "You have visit" = "Du/Ni har besök".

It would not be "better" to use "besökare" in the particular sentence here, because that is not how Swedish says it.

[MARK877133]

I was speaking "I" as myself an English speaking person and no one else. Far be it for me to impinge on how natives speak their language. Thanks for the quick response.

[Baxy187751]

I wrote , du har en besök ...why it is not correct

[ion1122]

Literally, the Swedes do not say "You have a visitor" or even "You have a visit". What they say, literally, is "You have visit" -- no article.

That 's just how it is.

[Marlie983518]

Can this also mean that you have more than one visitor, as in the German "Du hast Besuch", which doesn't define if it's one or several visitors?

[ion1122]

Here we are given the English first: "You have a visitor". That can only refer to one visitor.

But the Swedish "Du har besök" can refer to one or more than one visitor.

The Swedish (like the German) is literally talking about the visit (singular) rather than one or more than one visitor.

[Marlie983518]

Ah, thank you. That cleared that up for me.