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- "Han gik og svømmede i havet …
"Han gik og svømmede i havet hele sidste år."
Translation:He was swimming in the sea all of last year.
13 Comments
Native speaker.
You would never say this, it is weird and slightly illogical.
The sentence would translate to 'he walked and swam in the sea (ocean) all of last year'. A better version would be 'Han svømmede i havet hele sidste år' In general, many of the sentences in this lesson contains 'stod' (stood) or 'sad' (sat), which are often plain wrong or unnecessary, and would be omitted.
Are you sure this is wrong?
I'm not a native Dane, but in the hints section they said that these constructions are used to express ongoing actions (like English present progressive). This was confirmed by several natives here.
I am a native dane, and can say for certain that the sentence is incorrect. As mentioned above, the translation from danish completely omits 'han gik' (he walked) in the english version. Using the words above, the sentence could be restructured to: 'Han gik I havet og svømmede hele sidste år', which would translate to 'he went into the sea and swam all of last year'. 'Gå/gik' in danish is used just like 'Go/went' in english (Jeg gik i seng/I went to bed).
At least the English sentence doesn’t suggest that the swimmer didn’t get out of the water for the whole year, just that it was a regular activity for the whole year. Likewise for the Danish sentence?
We must be talking about someone doing this somewhere warmer than Denmark, like Indonesia.
"He swam in the sea all of last year." probably a better English translation.
82
Why is this not translated into something like "he WENT swimming in the sea all of last year"??? And I agree, native speakers find this construction not only weird but tell me that nobody in Denmark would use this!
