have your cake and eat it too

I bought a book of English idioms translated to Swedish when I visited the UK a couple of weeks ago. It was a cool find. I've been asking people "give me an idiomatic expression" then looking it up to see the Swedish version.

Many of them mean the same, but not all. As an example, though not from the book, using "guinea pig" to mean a test subject is translated correctly to "försökskanin" or "researcher's rabbit."

Dana wanted to know "have your cake and eat it too." It's "båda äta kakan och ha den kvar" which is directly translated as "both eat the cookie and have it remain".

That ordering make more sense to me. In English at least "and" can mean a temporal ordering. "Go to the store and buy food" means "Go to the store and then buy food." If I have my cake then of course I can eat it. But if I said "eat my cake and have it too" then the conflict stands out.

Learning Swedish helps me understand my native language.