Tråkig usually appears in dictionaries as the Swedish equivalent of boring or 'dull', but its not always easy to translate directly. Hear how it's pronounced in the audio clip below:
Tråkig is more versatile than English boring, and is often used generally to describe something bad, sad, unpleasant, or annoying.
For example, if your bike is stolen or you injure yourself, a Swede might say Oj, vad tråkigt! Theyre not telling you that your bad luck is boring them; its a sympathetic expression, which in English we might translate as oh no, how annoying/sad or oh, what a pain.
This is especially true in the expression tråkigt nog, which means sadly, as in: Tråkigt nog finns det många exemplar av ojämställdhet i världen (sadly, there are many examples of inequality in the world).
But in other situations, tråkig can be ambiguous. For example, if you share an anecdote with Swedish friends and they reply 'det var en tråkig historia' (that was a sad/boring story), you'll need to rely on other clues such as their tone and the general context to work out what they mean. If you want to be clear that you mean 'boring/tedious', you can use the word långtråkig, a more emphatic form of tråkig.
Tråkig comes from an old Swedish verb, tråka, which originally meant to push together/to clamp and is related to the words trycka (to push) and tryck (pressure) in todays Swedish.
Over time, the meaning of this word developed from referring to physical pushing to metaphorical pushing, in the sense of going over and over the same point. From there, it soon came to mean 'to walk/move slowly' and was also used to mean 'to work slowly'.
Today, the verb tråka is still used, but usually combined with the preposition ut to mean to bore, for example: jag ska inte tråka ut dig med alla detaljerna (I wont bore you with aRead More – Source
[contf]
[contfnew]
thelocal.eu
[contfnewc]
[contfnewc]
