"The girl has several turtles."
Translation:Flickan har flera sköldpaddor.
17 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
The spelling of "turtle(s) " in Swedish really has me stumped! Is there a spelling rule that can help me?
Yes! Most en-nouns that end in "a" work this way.
en skölpadda (a turtle) skölpaddan (the turtle) skölpaddor (turtles) skölpaddorna (the turtles)
en skola (a school) skolan (the school) skolor (schools) skolorna (the schools)
They mean different things. flera means 'several', några means 'some', and många means 'many'.
I mean why don't they just say 'some' like in French (un, une, *des) or 'many'; Why 'flera'?
Native French speaker here : Arnauti is right here. A straight up translation of several would lead to "plusieurs". That said there are subtleties. Several is used on an uncountable amount in English as opposed to many (många). However it isn't set in stone and in the case you refer to countable objects, then several is accepted to be less than many. As they are two Germanic languages, I would say this can extend to Swedish (En vecka har många dagar/Mannen har flera slipsar).
I also would suggest to approach Swedish more from an English angle than from French. French is a Romance language which is different from Germanic languages and have properties of their own. V2 word order is a good example where French won't really be of any help.
Cheers and good luck.
Hm… do you mean as in why this word exists in the first place? I don't think I can answer that. The closest semantic equivalent in French would probably be plusieurs, but I am certainly not good enough at French to explain this from a French point of view.
I think we probably teach this word too early on in the course which leads to there being too many sentences with it in the course overall, that may be part of the problem.
Almost yes, but the problem is that we say one, many or one, some. But here I was taught en/ett, flera. So is it more common to be taught first or they teach many or some?
You're generally allowed one typo per word as long as it doesn't then turn into antoher word, but you have two: sköll should be sköld and pador should be paddor.