sköldpaddan dricker vatten.

I'm having fun with Swedish. Our next-door neighbors are a very nice Danish couple, so I decided to check out Danish on Duolingo as well. (I was about to write "as a lark," but that sort of represents everything I do with my spare time.) There's a certain level of mutual intelligibility among Swedish/Danish/Norwegian, so I thought I'd see for myself. It's interesting, of course: the words for "man" and "woman" are cognate (man/mand and kvinna/kvinde), but "boy" and "girl" are not (pojke/dreng and flicka/pigin).

(I had to stop both Danish and Norwegian: all the words are too close together for me to keep track, and I also don't trust Duolingo's pronunciation across the three.)

I bestirred myself to actually look up Swedish's indefinite articles (translated as English "a/an"), en and ett. One Swedish teacher writes that there used to be three, formerly labeled masculine/feminine/neuter, but then they simplified and now about 75% of things are en, and the remainder ett. These come in handy for forming the definite article form ("the"), so ett äpple becomes äpplet, and en björn becomes björnen.

The rules get more complicated with plurals and then definite plurals, depending on the final vowel (or occasionally consonant?) in the word. Duolingo doesn't help with this: it's fun, but it's best not to confuse it with learning a language, exactly, since it neither focuses on useful phrases, nor explains rules nor grammar. I mean, do I know more Swedish now than I ever expected to? Sure, and I love learning stuff. But, Duolingo clearly has algorithms driving much of its learning, and may have topped its previous best sentence:

Hon har en älg. / "She has a moose."

With a new contender:

Björnen tycker om vegetarianen. / "The bear likes the vegetarian."

Though once I get off the plane in Stockholm, I will definitely look for a chance to use either of those.