De har flera elefanter.

"They have several elephants" is not an obviously useful sentence for Sweden, though it is chock-full of delicious cognates. Lest anyone say the Scandinavian cultures are too hard to tell apart, friends using Duolingo for Norwegian say it gives them sentences like "I am drinking on the floor," which I think we can all agree is in every way less appealing than "She has a bear." It certainly suits the flavor of Norwegian I'm descended from, though.

After years of Spanish, an occasional dalliance with French, and shaking my head from afar at German's die/das/der, I am really appreciating Swedish's lack of linguistic "gender." At some point--I gather pretty recently, as these things go--condensed from having a masculine/feminine/neuter like German, into just having the indefinite articles ("a/an" in English) ett and en: ett äpple, en elefant. That dictates how you form definites ("the"): äpplet, elefanten. And the word "it": det, den. (I don't know which "it" you use when you don't already know what the object is, but I'm sure it's something.)

However it got there, det is actually pronounced sort of like "day," but of course that's the natural pronunciation of de. So instead, de is pronounced..."domm."

Maybe "m" wasn't pulling its weight and they had to give it some extra work to do.