Where English says going to, Swedish literally says coming to, as in jag kommer att hjälpa dig for I am going to help you. This lesson explains when att can be safely dropped in speech and when other helping verbs like ska or vill never take it at all.
Vocabulary in this lesson
Transcript
The full transcript of this free lesson. Swedish lines have their English translation underneath.
At this point we've looked at how to go into the future using ska or sometimes pronounced "ska." So, using ska, that will take us into the future, it's equivalent of saying "will" in English. But there are other ways of doing this. Another way of doing this in English is by saying "I'm going to". So you use the verb "to go", and you say "I'm going to help you", that means "I'm going to help you in the future", like "I'm going to help you tomorrow, next month", and so forth.
So by using "going to", we can go into the future. In Swedish you can do the same, however you don't use "go", instead you use the verb "come". So you're literally saying "I'm coming to help you". And by saying "I'm coming to help you", that means "I'm going to help you". So let's practice this word: kommer. So the changed verb is kommer, and the dictionary form was "to come", att komma.
And it can also be used regularly to mean "to come" as well. So, if you say jag kommer, what do you think that would mean?
"I come". If you want to say "they come", how would you say "they come"?
De kommer. Okay, but now we're going to use it to take us into the future, and to say "I'm coming to" and then do something. So for instance, by using kommer, how would you say "I will ask"?
And if you're unsure about "ask", in Swedish it's fråga, fråga.
Jag kommer att fråga. And here, something very interesting occurs because we see the att. Now, the att properly, we should actually have the att included, so it should be jag kommer att fråga. "I'm going to ask", so the "to" is included. The reason why we haven't included the "to" before, like for instance, "I will eat", "jag ska äta", you can't say "jag ska att äta".
The reason for that is that "ska", just like "will" and "can", "kan", "vill", all of these words are referred to as help words or helping words. Uh there's other terms for it grammatically, but I think help word makes sense.
It's a It's a type of word that helps you do something. So when you say "ska", well it's helping you get into the future, right? These types of verbs, they don't require, they shouldn't actually have the "att".
So when you say "jag vill äta", you can't say "jag vill att äta". That sounds very off. However, when you look at other types of verbs, you actually need to use the "att", technically speaking.
However, in reality, in everyday speech when people are talking to each other, it's commonly omitted, and it doesn't sound off. And that's the most important point that I want to sort of hammer home, is that we want to be able to speak Swedish as people in Sweden do.
We want to be able to speak Swedish in a native way. But at the same time being aware of what is considered the most proper form when writing, for instance. The safest way would actually be to simply remove the "att" and to say "jag kommer fråga", which is what you would hear in everyday speech.
You would also hear "jag kommer äta", "I'm going to eat", even though technically it should be "jag kommer att äta". So the easiest way to not get confused is to simply omit the "att" and work with "jag kommer fråga".
So how would you say "you will eat here"?
"Ni kommer äta här." If you want to be 100% proper, you would say "ni kommer att äta här".
In everyday speech, you would hear "ni kommer äta här".