Swedish reflexive verbs: tvättar mig

So let's look at some examples with all of the different variants. I am washing myself. "To wash" is att tvätta, tvätta.

When you change it, it becomes -ar, så tvättar, tvättar. So how would you say "I wash myself"?

Jag tvättar mig. Jag tvättar mig. What about "you're washing yourself" or "you wash yourself"?

Du tvättar dig.

And what about "he is washing himself"?

Han tvättar sig. And of course we know that "she" is the same: hon tvättar sig. And "it" is also the same: den tvättar sig, or det tvättar sig. I mean it's difficult to imagine a situation where that would make sense, but grammatically speaking that's how we would say it.

"You're washing yourselves", how would you say that?

Ni tvättar er.

What about "we are washing ourselves" or "we wash ourselves"?

Vi tvättar oss.

And finally, "they are washing themselves".

De tvättar sig. We're ready to learn a couple of new words. And one word that is very important, of course, if you want to live – I suppose we all want to do that – is the word "food", which in Swedish is mat, mat.

And you don't really say en mat, because in English you don't say "a food", right? You wouldn't say that. You talk about food as a collective. So, mat. However, it's important to know that mat is like an en-word, so when you say "the food", you would say maten, maten.

To say "water", you would say vatten, vatten. And here it's the same thing, you don't say "a water". To say "money", "money", you would say pengar, pengar.

Let's look at some examples. How would you say I have money?

Jag har pengar. Of course money was pengar.

What about do you have money?

Har du pengar?

Okay so now we have a longer sentence and we need to know how to say buy. To say buy in Swedish as in purchase something, I need to buy something, you would say köpa, att köpa. And when you change the verb it becomes köper, köper. And to say and, like and this and, you would say och, och.

So given that knowledge, how would you say I want to buy, buy is köper, I want to buy water and, and is och, food with my money. So I want to buy water and food with my money.

So you break it up. I want to buy. Buy is köpa, to buy, köpa. And then of course and is och. So all together how would you say it?

Jag vill köpa vatten. I want to buy water.

Och mat med mina pengar. So to say with, what you said was med, med.

Jag vill köpa vatten och mat med mina pengar. Here we see something very interesting. You probably said med min pengar. However in Swedish you have to change min to mina if you have plural. So, mina is when you use when you have something that's plural.

So min student, That would be "my student". Mina studenter, "my students". In English you say "my" in both cases, in Swedish you would need to change it.

It's actually funny because there is a dialect in Swedish where you don't change the verb. It's in the north, there they actually don't change it, so they use the same in both cases. So technically I suppose you could get away with not changing it, and that would actually conform to one particular dialect, but not the most official way of saying it, if that makes sense.

"Can you give me money?" How would you say that?

So, to give was ge.

Kan du ge mig pengar?

And if you want to ask in a really nice way, you really want that money, so you want to say, "Please, can you please give me money?" To say "please", you would say: snälla, snälla.

So how would you say, "Can you please give me money?" Kan du snälla ge mig pengar? Kan du snälla ge mig pengar? And snälla, if you remove the "a", it actually becomes "kind", it's the word for "kind": snäll.

Han är snäll. "He is kind." So snälla is almost like "kindly" in that sense. "Please", "Can you please?" Kan du snälla?

Let's actually use that one, snäll, "kind", and say, "Can you be kind and give me money?" "Can you be kind and give me money?" Sounds a bit off perhaps in English, but in Swedish it's actually possible to say this and it sounds perfectly normal. So how would you say that: "Can you be kind and give me money?" Okay, so "to be" was att vara, att vara.

So, "Can you be kind?" Kan du vara snäll och ge mig pengar?