In Swedish, the verb få (to get, to receive) is the perfect tool for talking about discoveries—a crucial skill in the world of espionage.
Finding Out: Få veta
When used as an auxiliary verb, få usually means "to get to" or "to be allowed to." However, when paired with verbs of cognition or perception, it describes the start of knowing or perceiving something.
The most common combination is få + veta (to know), which translates to "to find out." Conjugate få and leave veta in its bare infinitive form.
| The spy found out everything about the operation. | Spionen fick veta allt om operationen. |
Getting to See and Hear: Få se and Få höra
This same structure applies to your senses. Pairing få with se (to see) or höra (to hear) simply means "getting to see" or "getting to hear" something.
| When do we get to see the informant's identity? | När får vi se informantens identitet? |
| Thanks to the spy, we got to hear who eavesdropped on the agent. | Tack vare spionen fick vi höra vem som avlyssnade agenten. |
Because få acts as the auxiliary verb, it carries the tense. You will frequently see this construction in the past tense (fick) when reporting on a completed mission.
| They got to see how the spy infiltrated the operation. | De fick se hur spionen infiltrerade operationen. |
Keeping Secrets: Adding Adverbs
To say that someone "never found out" or "rarely gets to know," add a sentence adverb like aldrig (never) or sällan (rarely). In a standard main clause, the adverb goes immediately after the conjugated verb (får or fick).
| One rarely finds out the truth about a secret operation. | Man får sällan veta sanningen om en hemlig operation. |
| We never found out if they managed to decode the file. | Vi fick aldrig veta om de lyckades avkoda filen. |