Posts in February 2009

Alla hjärtans dag

Posted by Anna Ikeda
Feb
15
2009

That’s what Valentine’s Day is called in Sweden.

  • alla – all
  • hjärta (def. hjärtat, pl. hjärtan, def. pl. hjärtana) – heart
  • dag – day

You’d know immediately that something is up by all the chocolate hearts at the supermarkets. And for those on a strict budget there are boxes of red geléhjärtan (as Mats has pointed out - even though some people and even companies write this word separately as “gelé hjärtan” - that is not correct) on sale, too.

Valentine’s Day came to Sweden sometime in the mid 60s promoted heavily by commercial interests. Of course, as elsewhere in the world, retailers saw it as yet another opportunity to sell more stuff. And what a better excuse than to guilt those buying that stuff and tell them it’s all for love, right? Anyway, with varying degrees of success it kind of seemed to work.

But how do average people on the street feel about Valentine’s Day?
I thought that an informal poll was in order.

I went downtown and in front of a local chocolate store began to ask questions about whether or not Valentine’s Day is seriously celebrated in Sweden.

These were the answers:

  • - foreign men with foreign wives (from countries where Valentine’s Day is a long-standing tradition) – “Yes, of course we celebrate it.”
  • - foreign men with Swedish wives – “I didn’t marry a Swede to bother with Valentine’s day. If I needed yet another excuse to be forced to buy gifts, I’d stick with my own kind.”
  • - Swedish men with foreign spouses – “Of course we celebrate it – I’d be sleeping outside in minus 10 degrees C if I didn’t bring her a gift.”
  • - Swedish men with Swedish wives – if the wife was within earshot – “Yes, I guess we celebrate it.” If the wife was nowhere to be seen – “I think I do enough already as it is, what more could she want?”
  • - women, both foreign and Swedish – “I hope he’ll do something special for me tonight.”

So there you have it – straight from the mouths of the masses.

As for me, my love promised to fix my computer. And since I missed posting on Valentine’s Day proper, you can easily guess that it ended with promises. Tomorrow my laptop is going to see a handsome computer doctor.

 
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“Swedish – An Essential Grammar” - book review

Posted by Anna Ikeda
Feb
13
2009

“Swedish – An Essential Grammar”
Authors: Philip Holmes and Ian Hinchliffe
Published by Routledge
ISBN: 0-415-16048-0

I totally forgot I had this book. Yesterday I was cleaning out some stuff and whoops, it just fell out of the box and hit me on the head.

I think I packed it away because once upon a time I really didn’t care for it all that much. What turned me off was the language in this book. It’s highly specialized. You need to really know your grammar and grammatical terms to make sense of the explanations in this volume. Otherwise you’ll be stuck trying to make sense of such sentences:
“Some indeclinable adjectives may be used either attributively or predicatively.” Or
“Often the separated forms are concrete and the integral forms abstract in meaning.” Yeah, like, totally.

But I guess in the last few years my tolerance for this sort of language has dramatically increased (living in Sweden will do that to you) and this morning I’ve started to read this book again. And I have to say that despite the sometimes tedious explanations, this is a wholly excellent book.

True, sometimes you may need someone to explain things to you using simple words shorter than three syllables. But apart from that, this is a great Swedish grammatical reference.

It covers everything that needs to be covered, it’s very well organized (always a plus in a grammar book) and gives you more examples of the stuff it explains than you’ll ever need.

In short: to buy or not to buy? Definitely – to buy.
Two thumbs up!

 
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Free Valentine Ecards and 16 Language Love Song for Valentines Day

Posted by margie
Feb
12
2009

This Valentine’s Day, send free Valentine ecards that are animated, musical, and—best of all—say “I love you” in any of 9 languages! It’s our way to celebrate the holiday…

Also, learn how to say “I love you” in Swedish and 15 other languages by watching the new love song video starring a very musical Transparent Language employee! Hint: forward this video to your sweetheart for extra points!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Cl6tQ1T-kg

Happy Valentine’s Day!

 
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If - om, Adverbial Clauses

Posted by Anna Ikeda
Feb
10
2009

A couple of posts back Mo asked how to say stuff like “if you are….I am ….”
And since she asked, I thought it would be a good idea to talk today about adverbial clauses (adverbialsbisatser).

What is an adverbial clause? It’s when an entire subordinate clause sentence can act as an adverbial. Uh-huh, I hear you say. We’re moving into a heavy-duty grammar territory.

Not really. You use subordinate clauses every day in your normal conversations, you’ve just probably never realized that they have a fancy grammatical name.

Those subordinate clauses that are also adverbial clauses can be recognized by those typical opening words (bisatsord), such as:

  • när – when
  • innan – before
  • medan – while
  • därför att – because
  • om – if
  • trots att – although
  • eftersom – since, as

Mo had a question regarding a sentence construction with “if.”
So, let’s pick “if” from our list and see what happens.

  • Om – if

Jag blir arg om han kommer hit. – I get angry if he comes here.

See? Not so difficult.
It works just like in English.

Now, let’s take this example apart.

  • Jag – subject
  • Blir – verb
  • Arg - adjective
  • Om han kommer hit – adverbial

In English, you can flip the order without any problems, you can say either:
I get mad if he comes here.
Or
If he comes here I get mad.

Either way is fine.

Well, it’s a tiny bit more complicated in Swedish.
Remember what we said about the word order in sentences? That you can front an adverbial? And that the verb always comes second in a sentence?

So now, instead of a one-word adverbial, we have a whole sentence that’s an adverbial:

  • Om han kommer hit (if he comes here)

Then must come the verb: blir.
Then the subject: jag
And finally, the adjective: arg.

So what do we get if we put it all together? This:

  • Om han kommer hit, blir jag arg.

So, remember: those pesky little bisatsord like om must be followed by a subject of the clause. (example: om HAN kommer hit – han is the subject of this adverbial clause.)

If those pesky little bisatsord open a sentence, then you know that sentence is a long, huge adverbial clause that must be followed by a verb. (example: Om han kommer hit, BLIR jag arg. - blir is the verb in the main sentence.)

If those pesky little words sit inside, or rather, between sentences, it’s easy peasy, nothing changes. (example: Jag blir arg, OM han kommer hit.)

Well, nothing changes as long as you don’t have a not/inte in that sentence. But we’ll talk about that next time.

 
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How To Read a Car Ad

Posted by Anna Ikeda
Feb
7
2009

It looks like we’ll have to sell our car. Why? To buy a better car. Ours is not bad, but it’s time to upgrade. And besides, I’d rather have a kombi (wagon) than a 2-door coupé.

So, my guy delegated me to prepare a sale ad. Since I’ve never done it before, in any language, I thought I should take a look at how other people do it.

The first site I visited is the largest car site in Sweden (Sveriges största motorsajt) – bytbil.se. I clicked on “personbilar” (passenger cars) and started to read.

First I was asked to select “märke” (make, such as Audi, BMW, etc…). The next box asked me to select “modell” (model). So first, you click on make, and then choose the appropriate model. Easy enough.

Next came “fordonstyp” (kind of vehicle). The choices were many: sedan, kombi, halvkombi, SUV, etc… I determined that my car is a sportkupé.
Drivmedel (fuel) was next. Again, there was a plethora of choices, but the two most popular ones are of course bensin (petrol) and diesel. My sportkupé runs on bensin.

Ok, what’s next? “År” (year) was self-explanatory. So was “mil” (mileage). But, one thing to remember about mileage in Sweden – it’s normally shown in Swedish miles, and 1 Swedish mile = 10 kilometers. So, for my car, the mileage is 11800 Swedish miles. Yes, that’s a lot, but it’s an old car, too.

And finally, we get to the mysterious and oh-so-important “växellåda” – transmission/gear box.
Here the choices are: “automatisk” (automatic transmission), “manuell” (stick shift) and “sekventiell.” And I had to look this one up on the internet - it’s a sequential manual transmission, which I just learned is used mostly in race cars and high-performance vehicles.

My car has automatisk växellåda.

So, now I think I am ready to write my car ad! Now let’s hope it sells quickly!

 
Posted under Vocabulary
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