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Just to indicate that not only Swedes think it perfectly reasonable to talk about buying a service, I am an American (admittedly elderly and academic, but not an economist) who has seen, heard, understood, and probably even used myself just such a construction, without even giving it a second thought.
I agree. As a native English speaker, I think context would be necessary for me to understand either "I'm buying a service" or "I'm buying a favor", but both seem equally grammatically correct. Here's an example of the expression being used in a national publication: "The rationale for including the domestic clause was to prevent a state—or even Congress—from buying a favor from the president."
I honestly can't say I like it... but you're right, it's certainly in use like that. I've added it now.
I don't understand this. There was this other lesson I was going through just before this one (I can't remember which one), and there I translated "the service" as "tjänst" and it gave me an error. The correct answer in that specific context would have been "Servicen". I looked up in discussion and it was mentioned that Servicen is the service such as one you get in a store and officialy (from post, from a clerk, etc...), while tjänst is more of a favor, something you ask of a person to do for you. This made me understand that service is a service and tjänst is a favor. So now I come here and suddenly tjänst is not a favor anymore (as it was again shown as a false answer) so you're not buying a favor, but a service - the service that by definition is "Servicen" and not "tjänst" - which I was told to be wrong about in the last lesson. So it means you can't buy "tjänst", you can only buy "service". So, is there any chance these contexts can be adopted and synchronized between lessons, so I don't get told the context of these two words means one thing in one lesson and completely other thing in another lesson? Thanks.
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Another option could be that a native speaker could give an explanation here :)
Edit: We now accept buying a favour as well, see Stephanie's answer above. Original answer below.
English "service" has several meanings, and they differ somewhat in Swedish. For the "favour" sense, you can use tjänst, but we don't accept it here because you can, by definition, not really sell favours. :)
Going the other way, the Swedish tjänst can also mean different things. For the kind of service you buy - such as a taxi drive or a haircut - it's a perfect fit with the English service. If it's the service of e.g. customer service, then it does not work.
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Haha, I also wrote favor for tjänst. I really thought this was referring to a bribe and was a tongue in cheek way of expressing it.
what does this mean? what is an expample of buying a service? it doesn't really make sense in english.
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One authentic example from Google: When I pay someone to cut my hair or do my taxes, I am buying a service. I don't think there's anything strange about this in English, maybe it's just unexpected out of context.
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In American English we say we "buy" something if we can take possession and ownership of an item, otherwise we "pay" for it. This is made somewhat murky by recent "terms of service" agreements that only assign license to items, like music or software downloads. This is why for digital items they'll use the verb "purchase" instead.
People use buy for digital content all the time in the US. Which is buying a service. And while paying for a service is more common, I see nothing odd about the term buy.
thanks for the examples but no this still doesn't work in english. you would never say i'm buying a service, nobody would understand if you said that. your specific with what your buying. i'm paying someone to do my taxes. it's a service that your paying for. "buying" also would indicate that your taking possession of something, "paying for" someone to do something is different. it would make a little more sense if you said i'm paying for a service. but even then it's still very vague.
Is this really that big of a deal? Even if it's not a common expression, no reasonably fluent English speaker would struggle to understand at all what you meant if you said you were buying a service. In fact, a quick Google search of the phrase turns up a newspaper article with that expression in the headline: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015/07/15/is-buying-a-service-to-freeze-your-body-after-death-a-human-right.html.
It's really tiresome when people use words like "never" or "no one says" as if all englsih speakers from all the rgioans of all the countries who use english speak the exact same way.
Elderhewitt is right - it's not used in everyday English. It is often used in economics where the distinction between wares and services is prevalent, but the way the sentence is constructed sounds unnatural. I can't think on any reasonable situation where such a sentence would be used.
sigh Elderhewitt is NOT right -- buying a service is perhaps uncommon in his/her dialect, but not incorrect. And once again, this is a Swedish course, and therefore NOT the space to debate English conventions. If it were, we could point out the problems with elderhewitt's capitalization, run-on sentences, punctuation, confusion of your and you're...
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It’s not a common sentence in practice, but neither is “the elephant is eating a strawberry”. It’s perfectly linguistically correct, and other people have given examples of it being used “in nature”.
I see your point, but I think the example you gave pertains to a different issue. While "the elephant is eating the strawberry" is uncommon, there is no alternative to delivering the same message that would be more common. However, I think most people would say that they "obtained" or "acquired" a service, rather than bought it.
You would say "i'm paying for a service" in English, which means roughly the same thing, I guess it's just slightly modified in translation.
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I agree with you. I guess we'll just have to suck it up and use buy to get past this one here.
Services are jobs people do for you, as opposed to varor (wares) which are physical or digital objects. Examples include taxi rides, translation services, software writing, etc.
