23 Comments
Thanks :) I wanted to clarify because in English buns means different things depending on where you live.
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Maybe the most common bullar are kanelbullar, which are roughly the same as what are called cinnamon rolls in the US.
I don’t have a feeling for the full range of “bullar”, but most of the things that are sold with “bullar” in the name here in Stockholm are similar to kanelbullar — in my native dialect of BrE, I’d be more likely to call them pastries than buns.
Does that include hot dog and hamburger buns? Or is it more like the round or sticky type buns?
No, hot dog and hamburger buns are korvbröd and hamburgerbröd respectively.
Re-recording
The voice is not quite perfect on this sentence, as of September 25th, 2017, so I've taken the liberty of re-recording it.
The word bakar is wrong, screwing up the prosody for the entire (short) sentence.
Please find a correct recording on http://duolingo.vydea.io/0262bd8310f34a028c9a8e133680b9b7.mp3
For more info on re-recordings, please check the info thread: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/23723515
Thanks for listening. Ha en bra dag! :)
In Finnish we have word 'sämpylä' meaning a small bread and 'pulla'
I would translate 'sämpylä' = Småfranska eller fralla / bread roll or bun ('sämpylä' can be any kind of bread. it can be also sweet but not 'pulla', pulla is not considered bread).
I would translate 'pulla' = bulle / 'sweet bun' or 'sweet roll'. NOT 'bun', bun could be bread.
It the meaning of 'bulle' in Swedish same as the meaning of 'pulla' in Finnish? Anser man bullarna som bröd i Sverige?
How would you translate this:
"Isä leipoo pullia ja makeita sämpylöitä."
"Pappa bakar bullar och söta frallar" (is this correct?)
]Sorry I can't say this in English without writing the recipes. :( ]
How do I distinguish between dad is baking buns (right now) and (dad bakes buns (this is a thing he does) if pappa bakar bullar can translate to both?
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Context. This is just one case where our language conveys more information than the typical sentence in Swedish.
You could also say "Pappa brukar baka bullar" which means that it is something that he does often.
As the previous posters said, you get it from context or from adding an additional word for clarification ("brukar" in Swedish).
Swedish and German (probably other Germanic languages too, I guess?) don't have a "present continuous" verb tense like we do in English. In English, we differentiate between "I bake" (simple present) and "I am baking" (present continuous). In Spanish, they often use "(vowel)ndo" to form the present continuous.
This is interesting, because if you wind up interacting a lot with native Swedish or German speakers in English, many of them erroneously flip these two forms of the present tense... How can we blame them though, in their languages there's not a distinction to be made!
e.g., A colleague told me "I'm running" when he meant "I run"... I said, "Really? It looks like you're having fika with me." :p
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The form to unambiguously say that he is doing it right now is håller på att baka bullar (or håller på och bakar bullar, both work).
It's also possible to use verbs like står, sitter or ligger, depending on the person's position, which gives a 'stronger' continuous than the English one. There's a skill about these later on in the tree https://www.duolingo.com/skill/sv/Continuous-Forms (link won't work unless you've reached that point in the tree).
I must confess that the distinction between continuous and present is one of the things I still struggle with in English. It just seems so pointless to me. There are a lot of grammatical features of other languages that I can appreciate or even wish we had in Swedish, but this is not one of them.
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Gender is even worse, since it doesn't even carry meaning. Learning new languages is often a struggle to accept all these unnecessary oddities :P
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But these differences make learning also interesting! And the same with people
So to continue the sweet/savory discussion, would breakfast rolls also count as bullar, or is that something else? (Yeah I could check next time I'm at the baker's - but come to think of it I'm not even sure I've seen breakfast rolls around much in Swedish bakeries. The top local baker has excellent croissants though, albeit at Swedish prices).
