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Help with Swedish

Name: Anonymous 2011-02-26 22:42

Hello, I'm using the "Colloquial Swedish" book to slowly learn Swedish and I have come across a problem which it does not explain, I asked Yahoo!Answers but I got different answers which just ending up confusing me.

Two sentences which we learn in "Colloquial Swedish" is:
1) I Storbrittannien har man regn både på vintern och på sommaren.
2) Storbrittannien har ganska lite skog.

Why does sentence one have "har man" and sentence two only "har"? What does "man" do to "har"? I understand "man" translates to one, but I can't find how it really fits.

Thanks for your time.

Name: The fantastic Doctor Penis 2011-02-27 0:34

I'm from England, and I've been learning Swedish myself. I still don't know much, but I think I can help here.

In the first sentence, you might be having a problem related to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V2_word_order

As far as I can see, these sentences could be translated like this:
1) "In Great Britain, you get rain both in the winter and the summer."
2) Great Britain has a pretty small amount of forest.

I suppose, since 'man' is the Swedish equivalent of English use of 'one', or the general 'you'.
But I know that I could be wrong about this, and I don't know for sure.

Name: Anonymous 2011-02-27 13:13

I'm also an English-speaking Swedish learner and I concur with Doctor Penis here. His translations seem accurate to me.

Name: Anonymous 2011-02-27 18:21

I understand now, thanks.

Name: heisann montebello 2011-02-28 16:50

I'm a Norwegian, but we all speak a bit Swedish as well, so here we go!
Directly translated, words in <> are one in Swedish and words in () are those fitting in the specific sentence:
1) In <Great Britain> have one(you) rain both on(in the) winter and on(in the) summer.
2) <Great Britain> have(has) quite little(small) forest.

So "har man" means "you have". E.g. "Man fikar varje dag." = "You eat lunch every day." "Man har inte dät i Sverige." = "You don't have that in Sweden."

Kudos for learning a Scandinavian language. =)

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