"Er du ved at læse en god roman?"

Translation: Are you reading a good novel?

[RylieMcdon]

Up until this section I really thought questions like these would be written as, ''læse du en god roman?''.

[Zivadinovic]

That is a 99% correct translation and I would not think twice about it if you used that.
'Er du ved at' adds that it is something currently happening, as opposed to being a general thing. Much like 'are you reading/do you read.
(native speaker)

[hshelnutt]

would "Are you going to read a good novel?" work? it's pretty common here to use 'going to' and 'about to' interchangeably, so long as the speaker doesn't mean literally going somewhere for a purpose.

[Anna483351]

"Are you going to" would be "Skal du til at læse", "Er du ved at" is present

[wutaing]

Isnøt Øabout toØ future tense too though_

[boydi14]

Looks like someone forgot to switch to English keyboard

[NumsgilDid]

Does this mean "are you reading a good novel (these days)" or "is the book you are reading (right now) good"?

[RyagonIV]

It's more the latter. The sentence is talking about what is happening right now.

[22decembre]

why "ved at læse" but not "sider og læser" ?

[ShuffleMoomin]

I would also like to know this. That's what I put and was told it was wrong.

[22decembre]

Actually, as I have learn, "sider og læser" is more a matter of saying about you reading while sitting. It therefore implies a state of mind and so on.

Now I would do like that :

Are you reading a good novel? = Læser du en god roman ?

Er du ved at læse en god roman? = are you going to read a good novel ?

Sider du og læser en roman? = Are you reading a novel, well sitted (in an armchair, the cat on your knees with a coffee mug aside) ?

[RyagonIV]

Sidder, with two d. And that version ("Sidder du og læser..") should be accepted here, too.

[Blkx-Darkreaper]

There was a previous exercise where the phrase was "It is about to happen", not "It is happening" and they translated it as "Det er ved at ske". Just confusing that the tenses don't match

[MalaikaKhi]

No one says: "er du ved at læse en god roman" Almost everyone in Denmark just say: "Læser du en god roman"