"Medicinen smakar inte gott."
Translation:The medicine does not taste good.
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"Känns" is not passive, but a so called deponent verb, that looks passive but isn't. There is more info on deponent verbs here: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/6094592
The passive is used to mean "be [verb]ed", thus smakas means "be tasted".
No, but I would say "the room feels cold" and would leave it up to the interpreter to assume that I meant the room was being perceived as cold. As opposed to the room experiencing coldness.
I assumed that the presence of "Känns" and other verbs like it meant that it was necessary in swedish to define explicitly who was feeling what. Thus I thought it was necessary to say "the medicine is tasted as not good".
Unfortunately though I can't seem to find a clear explanation of the differences between deponent and passive verbs. So I think I could just be misunderstanding something quite badly.
On the one hand it is complicated, I'm afraid what I said in that thread there can be no agent who performs the verb action and there isn't an underlying idea that the action of the verb was caused by some external agent is the best explanation I can give of the difference between passive/deponent in Swedish.
On the other hand it is easy, all you really need to know is that some Swedish verbs end in -s without being passive. In English, I don't think The room feels cold is passive either, the -s is only there because it's third person singular.
So it's not that we use passive in a lot of cases where you don't, it's just that some verbs end in -s when you wouldn't expect them to.
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I think that much of the difficulty in understanding deponent verbs for an English speaker is that most languages (including English) don't use them, so if you haven't studied Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, or a couple of Nordic languages you likely haven't run into the term before (or thought about why it might be a useful concept). Another concept that seems to get used occasionally in these explanatory comments is supine forms, which we for all practical purposes don't really use in English. Looking at Wikipedia articles on these two subjects will give explanations and some examples which may be useful.