Swedish reflexive pronouns: mig, dig, sig

Okay, so let's practice some sentences.

How would you say, "Can you ask her?" Kan du fråga henne? And if you said, "kan du fråga hon", that would be incorrect, "kan du fråga hon". And this is a mistake that you'll sometimes hear actually Swedish people say, that they confuse the "honom" and the "han", the "henne" and the "hon".

So I suppose it's not the end of the world, but at the same time, it's not really correct. So, if you want to say, "Can you ask her?" "her" is the object form, so you have to say henne: Kan du fråga henne?

if she has it. So, this is the other part of the question: Can you ask her if she has it? And to say "if" in Swedish, you would say om, om. And this word om, o-m, two letters, o-m, this word can also mean "about".

It has the same meaning as "about" because Swedish is one of those languages where one word can mean a lot of different things.

So, the word "om", it can be used as "if", and you can also use it as "about".

Anyway, in this case it means "if". So, how would you say, "Can you ask her if she has it?" Kan du fråga henne om hon har den? Om hon har den, or det, depending on the context.

I need to have my book.

How would you say that?

Jag behöver ha min bok. Jag behöver ha min bok. Att behöva, to need. And if you, once again, say, "I haven't read it", how would you say that?

Jag har inte läst den. Att läsa becomes har läst.

If you want to say, "She's an inspiration. She is an inspiration," how would you do that?

Okay, here the pronunciation is important because it's the same spelling as in English. So what you need to say is: Hon är en inspiration. So the "inspiration," the "sh" sound, it becomes a "ch" sound. So that's inspiration, inspiration. Okay, so let's continue on by repeating pronouns as objects.

Before we talked about henne, that was "her", so let's begin from the beginning. How did you say, "to me", like, "give this to me"? "To me", how do you say that?

Till mig. Till mig. What about "to you"?

So be careful. It's not till du. If you said till du, it's incorrect. So what's the correct word? It's rhyming with the one above: mig.

Till dig. So, "to you", because now we're talking about the pronoun as an object in the end. Unfortunately or I suppose fortunately, depending on how you you look at it, in English it's the same. You say "you" when you want to start a sentence, like, "You give it to him." So the "you" for the beginning, when you're starting the sentence and you're talking about the pronoun as a person, as a subject you would say, the person in the beginning, then you say "you", du in Swedish.

However, if you want to talk about it as an object at the end of the sentence, "to him, for him", then you have to say dig, "to you": till dig.

What about to him?

till honom And of course we said to her was till henne. So what about to it?

till den or till det And to us?

till oss So once again the "us" part is very similar. "we" vi, "us" becomes oss. So you can see the parallels. And to say to you in plural, how would you say that?

till er So we haven't practiced this as much, but what you'd say is er, er, till er. To say to them, how would you say that?

till dem So the pronunciation is the same: de in the beginning, but it's just spelled differently. You had one was d-e, the other one was d-e-m. And we said that actually Swedish people they get this confused, so you can do it the easy way and just write d-o-m, always just write d-o-m, and that would be correct, although it's not the most formal way.

Okay, so now we're ready to talk about a different type of pronoun. And that is what's referred to as the reflexive pronoun. Because reflexive is when you're referring back to something.

So for instance in English, when we want to say "I wash myself", you add on the "myself" to refer to "I'm washing myself", going back to myself. And if you want to talk about he, you don't say "he washes he" or "he washes him", you say "he washes himself". So for certain verbs, you need to refer back to the person who's doing it.

So, these words are called reflexive. So, let's look at a few of these examples in Swedish. So, to say "myself" in Swedish, you would say: mig. That's very easy because that's the same as the object pronoun, right? till mig And also, if you want to say "myself", you say: mig.

It's spelled m i g. So how do you think, with this logic, how do you think you would say "yourself"?

dig Yeah, so it's pretty easy. It's the same as the one we practiced before.

However, if you want to say "himself", you wouldn't say honom. "himself", you would say: sig sig Isn't that interesting?

It sounds like "say" in English, but it's spelled s i g. And it's pronounced: sig, sig.

"herself" is the same: sig And also, "itself", also the same: sig If you want to say "ourselves", then you have to say: oss.

So, it's the same as the pronoun in the object form. "give it to us" "we wash ourselves" In Swedish, you would use oss in both those cases. So, what would you guess that "yourselves" would be? Well, "yourselves" would be er.

er And then, "themselves" would be: sig. So, what you can see is that for "himself", "herself", "itself", and "themselves", you would use sig in all those cases. And for the remaining ones, you use the regular object pronoun. Like, "to me", till mig.