The definite form of Swedish nouns

Okay, so now we're going to learn a new verb, which is very important, and this verb, when you change it, you add on -er, it becomes -er in the end.

And remember, in Swedish you can't have a lot of vowels in the end like a and e, like in English you have i and e connected to each other. You don't usually find this in Swedish. Instead, you find one vowel between two consonants. So, we're going to learn a new, important verb, and it's the verb for describing "need".

So to say "to need", in Swedish you would say att behöva. Att behöva. And "a need", like "I have a need", is ett behov, behov. But here we're going to look at the verb. We're going to focus on the verb "to need", att behöva.

So to say "I need", you would say jag behöver, jag behöver. And of course in Swedish you would use the same form in all of the remaining ones. So "you need" would be du behöver. And of course, at this point you probably know "he needs". How would you say that?

Han behöver. And you can also quickly give all of the remaining ones: hon behöver, den or det behöver, ni behöver, de behöver, vi behöver.

So, what was the word for "tomorrow"? Tomorrow.

Imorgon, i morgon. If you remove the i, morgon, similar to the English word "morning". And of course it means the same thing. So morgon means morning. I morgon, that means tomorrow, in morning, literally. So let's ask this question: are you presenting tomorrow?

No, I am not doing it.

Okay, so you need to break it up, the first part, don't think about the are, are you, that's a very English thing, the are, so you think present you, right? Present you. Presenterar du, that means present you. You present, du presenterar.

So, make it a question, you switch the order: presenterar du, and tomorrow is i morgon.

No, to say no, you say nej. I am not doing it. Jag gör inte det. So, presenterar du imorgon? Nej, jag gör inte det. And you can also notice that instead of saying i morgon, I said imorrn.

And this is simply very informal Swedish that you will hear when you're walking on the streets, talking to people.

Is it your car? No, it is not my car.

Är det din bil? Nej, det är inte min bil. And of course, the word for my would be min here, not mitt, because car is en bil. What about it is our phone?

Det är vår telefon.

For now, when we're saying it, we're using det.

We're going to talk later on about when you're going to use den. But for now, we're using "det". "Det är vår telefon." "It is our phone." "I need my mobile." Of course you wouldn't technically or typically refer to a phone in English as a mobile.

Regularly you would say "my phone". But in Swedish, you can say "my mobile". So, how would you say that? "I need"? And the word to say "need" was the one we just learned in the previous slide. So to say "need", you would say "behöver".

"Behöver". That's the changed form. So how would you say "I need my mobile"?

"Jag behöver min mobil." And this is actually something interesting, the word "behöver". Because in English, we don't say "behöver", we say "need", right? But there is actually, etymologically, there is actually a related word: "behooves". It's a very fancy word.

"It behooves you to act in this manner," right? So "behooves", if you look up the history of that word, you'll see that it comes from Old German. And it's related to "need", to the word for needing something. So "behöver", if you're struggling to think of "behöver", try to think of "it behooves you".

What was the word for "a house"? "A house".

"Ett hus".

Now, if we want to make this into a definite form, when I say "definite form", I mean a known form, when we're talking about something that we all know. So for instance, if I say, "Oh, did you see that presentation? The presentation was horrible." When I'm saying "the presentation was horrible", I am assuming that you already know which presentation I'm talking about.

That's why I say "the presentation". It's a very specific presentation that you have probably already seen. So, it's a known form. So, to make the known form in Swedish, we don't use "the". Instead, we would add on the ending.

So, ett hus, we would add on -et, because it's ett. Huset. Ett hus, huset. And that means "the house". Okay, so let's look at a different example.

This time we're looking at en. So, en natt. En natt.

That's "a night". So how do you think you would say "the night" in Swedish? If ett hus became huset, how do you think natt would change if it starts with en?

Natten. Natten. So you just add on the -en in the end, and you get "the night": natten. So let's learn another verb.

This one describes movement, like saying "go". So you say- To say "go", you would say gå, gå. So to say "I go", you would add on an r. You would say, jag går. So how would you say, "you go"?

Du går. "He goes"? Han går. "She goes"? Hon går. "It goes"?

Den, det går. "You people go"? Ni går. What about "they go"? De går. And finally, "we go"?

Vi går.