текст песни Fröken Fräken

Ah, you're learning Swedish? That's so cool! If you ever need help with anything to do with it, just let me know. :)

Thank you, I appreciate that! Sometimes I feel that some of the originators of songs don't get proper credit here on LT.

Thanks! I always try to think "What would I have wanted explained to me if I didn't know this song?". Please be aware that some of the words used ("sköna" for "beautiful", "jänta" in "värmlandsjänta", and "fröken") are somewhat old-fashioned though, and "sola" in "karlstadsola" is even dialectal (in standard Swedish it would be "solen").

Yes, you're right, "vacker" (or "vackra" to keep it plural like "sköna") would be a more common word for "beautiful", but conversely, "sköna" more commonly is used to mean "pleasant" or "comfortable" as in "sköna skor" ("comfortable shoes"). I used "gal" for "jänta", because it's somewhat colloquial, right? And "jänta", even though it was used more in the past, has probably never been the standard term for "girl". "Fröken" means "Miss", but it's just hardly ever used anymore (since the end of the 1960s, people in Sweden don't address each other with titles). I would say it's more common as a term for a female teacher, in the vocabulary of schoolchildren (but above elementary or early middle school no one would address or talk about their female teacher as "fröken").

Well, I would help you the best I could. I just wish I was better at grammar theory, because I'm pretty good at knowing how things should be, but unfortunately not always quite as good at explaining why... Hey, that's good! :D "Jag hoppas att jag snart kan prata med dig på svenska." would probably have been 100% (even though the conjunction "att" is sometimes dropped from everyday speech), but you were very close! :)

[Edit: Corrected typo]

It struck me that in the genitive case, it would be "sköna" (or any other adjective ending in "a") for nouns in singular too, as in "min sköna tröja", but now I kind of digress. :P

Perhaps female teachers of the pasts were always unmarried? I have no idea. :) You did not misunderstand me about the titles: In Sweden, Jane Smith is Jane Smith (or even just "Jane", when being addressed verbally, unless there are many Janes and you have to differentiate between them). Like I said, the titles were phased out in the late 60s. You can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du-reformen Of course some titles still exist, and some are even protected by law, but other than in the armed forces and when addressing the royal family, they're not used in spoken language.

Sure, there might perhaps be times when there really is no explanation to why things are the way they are, but what I meant was that usually there probably is a good explanation, but I just don't know about it, because I don't have the underlying theoretical framework.

Duolingo is right. I wish I could explain why it can never be "att" there. Take this with a grain of salt (and I hope I'm not mis-educating you), but if the sentence was "Han kommer inte (att) förstå vad jag säger" instead, the "att" would be kind of optional (at least in everyday speech, which isn't alway grammatically correct). I guess I should read up on the subject... These things would be better to know than to just have a knack for. No, not bad at all! :) Varsågod!

Okay, I hope this is the last thing I will say about when to use adjective forms ending in "a", because I feel it's doing more to confuse you than help you (and this is what makes me a bad teacher), but I also realized that it's not just in the genitive case it can be used for nouns in singular, but also in the definite case: "den sköna tröjan".

Yes, but even though Sweden is linguistically and culturally related to countries like Germany, it doesn't mean everything is the same. And this thing with the titles wasn't something that gradually fell out of use over time, but it was more like a conscious effort to abolish them in everyday speech. I've learned that Herr and Frau (and Fräulein too, I suppose) are used on a daily basis in Germany, but I really don't think it's like that in Norway, Denmark and Finland (I've been in those countries many times, but have never thought about it before). I hope Swedish people don't come across as rude when they are abroad, just because they're not used to using titles (well, I wouldn't be surprised if Swedish tourists appear rude or uncultured for other reasons... I apologize on their behalf... :*) ). I had too little knowledge of Arabic to know that titles are used a lot, but the honorific titles in Japanese have always fascinated me. Once I heard a Japanese aqcuaintance who has been living in Sweden for maybe 30-40 years, in a conversation in Swedish, refer to a young Japano-Swedish woman we both know well, as ****-chan, which I found really interesting. You said you need to think of someone's appropriate title before addressing themm, so I guess many different titles are used in Arabic?

Alright. I just feel it would be more helpful to you if I could say "it's like this, because of this and this..."; to be able to teach you the rules instead of on a case by case basis.

Hey, that's great! I think you nailed it! :D I would say that using "att" in the first sentence ("Jag tror att jag...") would be optional, and you chose not to, so that's fine. :)
(Well, grammatically there probably isn't such a thing as optionally using "att", and in general you might want to aim higher than the average Swede's everyday speech, because I think too many Swedes (even ethnic Swedes) speak rather poor Swedish, grammatically and vocabulary-wise. :/ )

I think that, once you learn it in a more structured way, you will find that the adjective declension follows some set rules, without any exceptions that I can think of. :)

Yes, I haven't spent much time in Germany, but I remember from German class that titles, as well as using Sie instead of du to show proper respect, like you mentioned, was very important. I'm sure it must have taken a big mental shift to stop using titles back in those days in Sweden. I'm glad to hear the Swedes you have met have acted properly. Yeah, that's a good point! :D

Ah, that's very interesting... I had heard a couple of them before, like getting a special title for having made the pilgrimage, but most of them were new to me. One thing I don't quite grasp though, is this thing with Ostaza: You said it's a female version of Mr; what did you mean by that? Is there any other case than unmarried or married? Or do you mean that Ostaza doesn't reveal marital status? :)

Oh, yeah, because you also get a certain status from being old, right? It seems the Egyptian society is very hierarchical, if you have to address even your parents respectfully (not saying that the average Swede disrespects their parents though, but there is just no extra respectful way to address them). Without knowing for certain, in English-speaking countries, I think it's highly unusual to be on a first-name basis with your teacher, and not addressing them in the correct way would probably get you in trouble.

Hey, no worries! I wouldn't ask about things like the use of titles in Arabic if I wasn't genuinely interested, and I must say I quite enjoy this conversation. :)