Breakdown of Hon borstar tänderna noga innan hon går och lägger sig.
Questions & Answers about Hon borstar tänderna noga innan hon går och lägger sig.
Tänder means teeth (indefinite plural), while tänderna means the teeth (definite plural).
In Swedish, when you talk about parts of your own body in a concrete action (washing your hands, brushing your teeth, combing your hair, etc.), you almost always use the definite form:
- Hon borstar tänderna. – She brushes her teeth.
- Han tvättar händerna. – He washes his hands.
- Hon kammar håret. – She combs her hair.
Even though English uses her teeth, Swedish does not normally add possessive (like sina) for these everyday body-part actions. The definiteness already implies “her own” in this context.
For everyday actions involving your own body parts, Swedish usually avoids possessive pronouns and uses the definite form instead:
- Hon borstar tänderna. – She brushes her teeth.
- Not: Hon borstar sina tänder (grammatically possible but sounds unusual or overly explicit in normal speech).
You would use sina tänder when you specifically need to contrast or emphasize whose teeth they are, e.g.:
- Hon borstar sina tänder, inte barnens.
She is brushing her own teeth, not the children’s.
But in a neutral sentence like the one you gave, borstar tänderna is the natural choice.
Noga is an adverb meaning roughly:
- carefully
- thoroughly
- properly
In Hon borstar tänderna noga, it modifies borstar and tells us how she brushes her teeth.
Typical positions for noga here:
- Hon borstar tänderna noga. (most natural)
- Hon borstar noga tänderna. (possible but less usual; can sound slightly marked)
You cannot put it at the very start in the same way as in English (“Carefully, she brushes her teeth”). Swedish would usually keep it near the verb or at the end of the main clause:
- Hon borstar tänderna väldigt noga.
- Hon borstar verkligen tänderna noga.
A few points here:
Innan hon går och lägger sig is a very common natural idiom meaning:
- before she goes to bed
Literally: before she goes and lies down (to sleep).
- before she goes to bed
The pattern går och + verb is a typical Swedish construction. It often means “go (somewhere) and then do X”, but in many cases it’s more like a fixed phrase and just sounds idiomatic:
- gå och lägga sig – go to bed
- gå och handla – go shopping
- gå och lägga sig tidigt – go to bed early
Går att doesn’t work here.
Gå att means “be possible (to do)”:- Det går att göra. – It is possible to do.
So hon går att lägga sig would be ungrammatical in this sense.
You can say innan hon lägger sig instead. That is also correct and common, and it basically means the same thing: before she goes to bed.
The version with går och just sounds a bit more colloquial/idiomatic here.
No, you cannot leave it out in Swedish. Each clause needs its own subject, even when it’s the same person:
- Hon borstar tänderna noga innan hon går och lägger sig.
Leaving out the second hon:
- Hon borstar tänderna noga innan går och lägger sig. – incorrect.
In English, you can sometimes drop the repeated subject (“before going to bed”), but Swedish normally does not allow that in a full clause. You need:
- innan hon går och lägger sig
literally: before she goes and lies down.
Lägger sig is the reflexive form of the verb lägga (to lay, to put).
- lägga sig = to lie down, to go to bed
Sig is a reflexive pronoun referring back to the subject hon:
- hon lägger sig – she lies down / she goes to bed
- hon lägger henne – would mean she lays her (someone else), which is not what we want.
So:
- att lägga något – to lay/put something (an object)
- att lägga sig – to lay oneself down → to lie down / go to bed
In going-to-bed contexts, lägga sig is the standard verb.
Swedish uses the present tense a lot for:
- current actions
- general truths
- habitual actions / routines
So Hon borstar tänderna noga innan hon går och lägger sig means:
- She brushes her teeth carefully before going to bed. (habit, routine)
You don’t need any extra word like “usually” in Swedish to show that it’s a habit; the present tense plus the context does that.
Compare:
- På morgonen dricker jag kaffe. – I drink coffee in the morning. (habit)
- Varje kväll tränar han. – He exercises every evening.
Yes, you can move the innan-clause to the beginning. Then you must use inversion (verb-second rule) in the main clause:
- Hon borstar tänderna noga innan hon går och lägger sig.
- Innan hon går och lägger sig borstar hon tänderna noga.
Notice the change:
- Clause-first: Innan hon går och lägger sig …
- Then in the main clause: borstar hon tänderna noga
(the verb borstar comes before the subject hon)
This verb-second rule applies to main clauses in Swedish: the finite verb (here: borstar) should typically be in the second position.
Grammatically it looks like coordination (“goes and lies down”), but in modern Swedish gå och + verb often behaves like a single unit. It’s sometimes called “pseudo-coordination”.
In går och lägger sig:
- It can literally mean she walks and then lies down, but
- Very often it just means “she goes to bed”, and the och is part of a fixed pattern.
Other common examples:
- Jag går och handlar. – I’m going to do some shopping.
- Han gick och lade sig. – He went to bed.
So yes, historically it’s “go and do X”, but for the learner it’s useful to treat gå och + verb as a common idiomatic construction.
Here are some common, natural alternatives with very similar meaning:
Hon borstar tänderna noggrant innan hon går och lägger sig.
(noggrant = a slightly more formal/explicit version of noga)Hon borstar tänderna noga innan hon lägger sig.
(dropping går och, still perfectly natural)Hon borstar alltid tänderna noga innan hon går och lägger sig.
(adding alltid to emphasize it’s a regular habit: “always”)Innan hon går och lägger sig borstar hon tänderna noga.
(same words, different word order)
All of these would be easily understood as:
She brushes her teeth carefully before going to bed.