If you want to become a full-fledged citizen of Sweden and feel like a full-fledged member of society, follow this really important recommendation: learn Swedish!

English is not enough

There is an interesting pattern: residents of small countries, as a rule, know three or four foreign languages. And vice versa: the larger the country, the fewer languages ​​its citizens know. Unfortunately, Russia is a vivid example of this. Almost all immigrants do not know Swedish when they leave. Some are not even going to learn it, hoping to communicate only in English. Of course, if you know English, you will not be lost in Sweden. After all, almost everyone here speaks Shakespeare’s language, and the Swedes will gladly take the opportunity to practice.

But when looking for a well-paid job, especially in municipal structures, you cannot do without knowledge of the only state language. In addition, knowing Swedish will help you establish relationships with people who will become your neighbors. Remember with what hostility we speak about guest workers who come to Russia and cannot explain themselves clearly.

Difficulty in learning Swedish by Russians

Swedish is quite difficult and learning Swedish can take a long period of time.

Firstly, Swedish belongs to the Scandinavian group, not related to the Slavic languages. Difficulties are usually related to phonetics and pronunciation. So, for example, there are seventeen vowel sounds alone. For comparison, in Russian there are only six of them. Even more difficult are double stresses and toning of syllables. Two identically written words, depending on the toning, will be translated completely differently. The word "anden" can mean either "spirit" or "duck". Moreover, tones are not designated in writing, but are defined by meaning.

Secondly, difficulties may arise even in finding a Swedish language textbook or enrolling in courses, especially if you do not live in a metropolis. We can recommend enrolling in online language courses that will solve the problem of distances. But, most likely, the knowledge you receive at home will be the minimum required. You can learn Swedish well after arriving in Sweden.

Swedish for expats

All legal immigrants are given the right to study the language at specialized SFI courses (Svenska f?r invandrare). On average, training lasts about one year. An additional incentive for successful completion of SFI courses will be the amount of CZK 12,000. If you want to improve the knowledge of Swedish acquired at SFI, you can enroll in the Komvux course “Basics of the Swedish language for foreigners” (Svenska som andrasprok grund).

Useful links when learning Swedish

Komvux is the name of specialized educational institutions for adults. Here you can study not only Swedish, but also enroll in a number of other courses, such as economics or management. If you already have a PUT (permanent residence permit) by the time you study at Komvux, you will be paid a stipend.

The following recommendations will also help you learn Swedish as quickly as possible.

1. Try reading the printed version of the work and listening to its audio version at the same time. This will make it possible to remember the correct pronunciation and spelling of Swedish words.
2. Make friends from Sweden on Skype - only live communication will improve your speaking skills.
3. Try reading a book you already know in Swedish.
4. Watch more films, listen to popular songs, read newspapers.

Some fun facts about the Swedish language

• Don't say "I'm walking down the street" in Sweden. In a literal translation, you will tell your interlocutor that you are engaged in prostitution.
• If a Swede says “no”, it means that he is listening to you. The Swedish nej (no) corresponds to the Russian “so”. As in English, “well” does not mean at all that everything is “good”.
• You should not rush to the aid of your Swedish friends if you hear a short “a” sound from them while inhaling. In our country, such an exclamation can usually be heard if a person suddenly gets scared or has an asthmatic attack. In Sweden, such a sharp sound “a” corresponds to our “uh-huh”, and just means that the person is interested and is listening to you.

Sweden is one of the most interesting countries in Europe. In terms of territory, it is in fifth place among European countries, but in terms of population it is only fifteenth. And the majority of its 10 million people speak the official language, Swedish.

Throughout its history, Sweden has been the most ethnically and linguistically homogeneous among European countries. For almost the entire history of the country, this language was the most widespread here. Thanks to Sweden, we learned about Carlson, Moomintroll, ABBA and IKEA.

What else is the language of this Scandinavian country famous for?

1. The modern Swedish dialect is derived from Old Norse. The three languages, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish, were inseparable until the 11th century. During the Middle Ages, Swedish became very different from Danish due to the fact that it was more influenced by other Germanic languages. Also in the 18th century, it was greatly influenced by French - a large number of words were borrowed from there. Although due to their close geographical location, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are still very similar, and residents of these countries easily understand each other.
2. Swedish is spoken throughout Sweden itself and is recognized as official in Finland, as well as the Åland Islands. Although in Finland the number of Swedish speakers does not exceed 10% of the population. There are about 10 million native speakers of this language, almost all of them live in Sweden.
3. The oldest written relic in Swedish is a rune stone dating back to 800 AD. Scattered throughout Sweden are these stones with inscriptions that were made when these places were inhabited by the Vikings. Rune stones often marked the graves of fallen warriors, so the records on them were appropriate.

1. Swedish does not have such an extensive vocabulary as, for example, English. This is due to the fact that it is distributed mainly in Sweden and does not have such an influx of neologisms and words from other languages.
2. Due to the paucity of vocabulary, one word in the Swedish language can immediately mean dozens of options. For example, “bra” means “good”, “normal”, and “wonderful”, and a lot of similar words in Russian.
3. Among young people in Sweden, a mixture of Swedish and Swenglish is common. This dialect is used almost equally with Swedish, but is not officially recognized.
4. In Swedish there is neither a masculine nor a feminine gender, but there is a neuter and a common gender. This feature appeared due to the fact that the formations of the masculine and feminine genders were so similar that they gradually merged into one genus. There are also no cases in this language.
5. The Swedes don't have a word for "please", so you have to be polite in another way. Most often, a respectful tone of voice and the word “thank you” are used.
6. Despite the fact that Swedish has been spoken throughout the country for many centuries, it was officially recognized only in May 2009. Until this moment, Sweden did not have an official language. In 2009, Sami, Finnish, Yiddish, Roma and Meankieli received equal status.
7. Everything supposedly “Swedish” in Russia - the table, the wall, the family - exists only there. In Sweden there are no such concepts.

1. The letter W was a variation of V for many years, and only in 2006 was it included in the alphabet as an independent unit.
2. The writer Tove Jansson, who gave the world Moomintroll, wrote her books in Swedish.
3. In the Swedish language, it is not even pronunciation that plays a huge role, but intonation. There are two types of stress - dynamic and tonic. In the second version, the speaker's tone drops and rises, which to a foreigner sounds like singing.
4. Swedes do not like conflict situations, which is reflected even in their lexical features. They have a special interjection between “yes” and “no” - they use it when they need to express refusal or doubt.
5. Everyone says "you" or "Du" to each other. This custom has continued since the 1960s, when a language reform called du-reformen was introduced. The address "you" ("ni") is used only in relation to royalty. Therefore, in ordinary life, a resident of Sweden will be very surprised if he is addressed as “you”!
6. The Swedish alphabet consists of 29 letters, similar to Latin, but with the letters Å, Ö and Ä.
7. You can learn this language in courses offered by 200 universities from 43 countries.
8. Modern Swedish began to take shape in the 14th century under King Magnus II Eriksson. However, the colloquial language that is used now, nusvenska, appeared only at the beginning of the last century, with the development of radio broadcasting and television. It was then that Swedish became more homogeneous, and the differences in dialects became equal.

1. All dialects common in Sweden can be divided into six groups - Svealand, Gotland, Götaland, Norrland, Finnish Swedish, southern dialect.
2. With the adoption of Christianity, many Latin words came to Sweden. For example, "kyrka" ("church"), paradis ("paradise"), mässa ("mass"). In the 19th century, the vocabulary expanded to include words associated with industrialization, such as "bojkott", "jobb" and "lokomotiv".
3. Swedish has very few adjectives compared to Russian. Usually they are replaced by complex words from several roots. For example, "chokladdryck" ("chocolate drink"), "världshavet" ("World Ocean").
4. Among the population of Sweden, two types of speech are common - simple and complex. Most difficult words like designförändring (“design change”) are not used in everyday situations. The Swedes don’t even know the meaning of these words themselves!
5. The longest word in this language is "realisationsvinstbeskattning" - translated as "capital gains tax".
6. Most Swedish words begin with S, and the least with Q, Z, X.
7. Some words have been preserved since Viking times and are understandable even without translation. For example, "mörk" ("darkness"), "tre" ("three"), "ett torg" ("bargaining").

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Swedish is the official language of Sweden and the Åland Islands and the second official language of Finland. This is one of the most beautiful languages ​​- its sound is similar to the cooing of doves.

Origins

In the II-IX centuries. the tribes that inhabited the lands of modern Sweden, Norway and Denmark spoke the same language - Old Norse, and used runic graphics for writing. Graphics appeared before our era - runes were repeatedly mentioned in the works of the Roman historian Tacitus. Some terms and techniques of runic writing have been preserved in modern Swedish.

Traders and wars “exported” the Scandinavian dialect to Europe and the northeastern lands of what is now Russia.

The demarcation of the linguistic community of the Scandinavian tribes coincided with the beginning of the Viking Age, which was marked by the raid of Scandinavian pagans on the British island of Lindisfarne in 793. During the period of the 9th-11th centuries. the tribal system is replaced by feudal relations, Sweden, Denmark and Norway become separate kingdoms, and differences in languages ​​become more and more significant.

Stages of language formation

Linguists consider the beginning of the history of the Swedish language proper to be 1050 and distinguish two main stages of its formation - the period of the Old Swedish language, which existed in the Viking and Middle Ages (IX-XVI centuries) and the period of the New Swedish language, which became dominant in the 16th century.

Several stages can be traced in the evolution of the Old Swedish language:

• runic Swedish, which existed until approximately 1225, used runic graphics for writing;

• Old Swedish classical (XIII-XIV centuries). The most famous manuscript monument of this era is the “Wesgoethic Laws” (1280) - written in Swedish using letters of the Latin alphabet;

• Late Old Swedish (XIV-XVI centuries). There were no uniform writing standards yet - each school of scribes had its own spelling rules.

New Swedish is also usually divided into:

• early modern Swedish (XVI-XVII centuries). Based on the central dialects of Stockholm, Uppsala and Södermanland, a modern literary language begins to take shape, the first Swedish university opens in Uppsala;

• New Swedish (from the beginning of the 18th century). The dialect foundation of the modern language is laid, the basis of spelling traditions and pronunciation norms is formed.

Modern national language

Swedish emerged as a single national language at the beginning of the 20th century. Prominent scientists, public figures, and writers made a great contribution to the development of the updated Swedish language; special credit goes to the founder of Swedish literature, August Strindberg.

The language now spoken by most Swedes, taught in schools and used in the media, is called "nusvenska" by linguists - literally "now-Swedish".

Dialects

In everyday speech, numerous local dialects of Swedish are preserved, characteristic of some provinces, cities and even parishes. Sometimes they differ greatly in pronunciation and grammar, and are often incomprehensible to residents of other places. By the way, many journalists on television speak with strong regional accents.

 Listen to the audio lesson with additional explanations

In this lesson we will work with nouns in Swedish.

Usually we do not include the topic of nouns in the basic course for 7 lessons simply because all the work on nouns in almost all languages ​​comes down to one thing: there is an article before a noun and it needs to be taught together with the word. All.

In Swedish, the principle of working with nouns is different from what we are used to. And we couldn’t ignore this feature. By the way, nouns work in the same way in Norwegian.
If you are interested in comparing, be sure to open the same lesson in our course Norwegian in 7 lessons.

This lesson will be simple, but a little “jewelry” - we will need to pay attention to the endings of nouns. We recommend returning to this lesson throughout the course.

Nouns in Swedish are divided into two genders - common and neuter. The indicator of gender in a foreign language is the article – indefinite or definite.

Indefiniteness in Swedish - indefinite articles:

en– for general gender:

en man man human
en kvinna – woman
en skola – school

ett– for the neuter gender:

ett hus – house
ettäpple – apple
ett bord – table

We use a noun in an indefinite form (with indefinite article) in cases where it is mentioned for the first time - just as in other European languages, for example, English and German.

Jaghar en penna. – I have a pen.
Det har är en katt. - It's a cat.

Of course, there are exceptions.

The indefinite article is NOT used:

before occupation, religion, nationality in cases where we talk about a person.

Han är biologist. - He's a biologist.
Hon är svensk. - She's Swedish.
Han är buddhist. - He is a Buddhist.

in cases where we are talking about uncountable nouns.

Jaghar inte tid. – I have no time.

in some stable expressions.

Jag äter middag klockan sju. – I have dinner (= eat dinner) at seven.

Definiteness in Swedish

Now comes the fun part!

There is no definite article in Swedish that is familiar to us.

How then do the Swedes emphasize something specific? Everything is very simple.

The Swedes get it this way: they simply take the indefinite article, stick it to the end of the word and thus get something specific:

for general gender:

en hund - hund en(dog)

If the noun ends with any vowel, only -n:

en flicka – flicka n(girl)

If a noun ends in -er, -el, -or, then, again, it is only added -n:

en syster – syster n(sister)
en nykel – nykel n(key)
en dator – dator n(computer)

for neuter added to the end of the word -et:

ett hus - hus et(house)
ett barn – barn et(child)

If a noun ends with any vowel, then only -t:

ettäpple – äppl et(apple)
ett frimärke – frimärk et(brand)

If a noun ends with endings -er, -el, then the penultimate -e disappears and is added -et:

ett monst e r–monstr et(pattern)
ett sec e l – sekl et(century)

If a noun has one syllable and it ends in -n or -m, then this is the last one -n or -m when a certain form is formed, it often doubles:

en ma n–ma nnen(man)
ett ru m– ru mmet(room)

There are no exceptions, so:

en tap - tap en(tap)
en son – son en(son)

The definite form of the noun is also used in cases where we know exactly who the object or part of the body belongs to, even if the object is mentioned for the first time. In these cases, if you use an indefinite form, you might think that it is just one of the objects, it is not known which one. This is especially clearly seen in the example with body parts:

Jag har ont i huvudet. – I have a headache (= I have pain in my head).

If you say “Jag har ont i ett huvud”, then it turns out that I have some kind of incomprehensible headache, one of many, which, of course, will sound strange.

The same rule applies to personal items, as well as items that are directly related to the person at the moment, for example:

Jag sitter vid datorn. – I am sitting at a computer (my own, specific one, and not just one of the computers that exist in the world).

Jag sitter på tåget. – I'm sitting on a train (in the specific train I'm traveling on, for example from Gothenburg to Malmö).

Han går i skolan. – He goes to school (a specific one, not a new one every day).

In English, sometimes a possessive pronoun can be used in a similar situation, e.g. "I brush my teeth" in English it will be “I clean my teeth”, and in Swedish “jag borstar tänder na” (tand – tooth, tänder – teeth, tänderna – (certain) teeth).

We won't give you rules for plurals. In this case, the Germans did the best thing, declaring that along with the article of a word, its plural form must be immediately taught. It's much easier, in fact, than learning the rules and exceptions to them.

In the exercises you will come across words in the plural - just learn them as a new word.

We will work on all this in exercises, so:

Ingen panic! - Don't panic!
Oroa er inte! - Do not worry!

This is the most important thing that you and I need to take away from this lesson.

It is clear that there are some exceptions to these rules, we will get acquainted with them in the exercises, but there are not very many such exceptions.

In the exercises, nouns of a certain form will be marked as (def. f.).

If there is no such mark near the noun, this means that the word is in an indefinite form, or it is clearly visible there that the form is definite: for example, this house or I'm selling an apartment(of course, your specific apartment).

Sweden is an amazing country that gave the world Carlson, the group ABBA and a computer mouse. It has strong trade unions and the longest life expectancy in Europe. Well, the Swedish language fully reflects the worldview of the Swedes themselves - it is democratic and very interesting to study.

1. Swedish is a representative of the northern group of Germanic languages. It is state-owned in Sweden and the second state in Finland. Swedish has a lot in common with languages ​​such as Norwegian and Icelandic. It is noteworthy that the Swede can easily read books and the press in Danish, but does not understand the spoken language of the Danes at all.

2. Some words are written and sounded the same in Swedish and Danish, but have different meanings. For example, the word “by” means “village” among the Swedes and “city” among the Danes.

3. Many young Swedes speak the so-called Swenglish, which is a peculiar mixture of Swedish and. In fact, English in this country is used at the same level as the state language, although it does not have official status.

4. The Swedes were not afraid of borrowing from other languages ​​before. So, back in the 14th century, along with the Hanseatic Trade Union, many words related to trade, construction, crafts and more came to Sweden. They continue to be actively used to this day.

5. There are a huge number of dialects of the Swedish language. In their formation, they managed to avoid the influence of traditional Swedish, and therefore they sometimes have almost unique grammatical and phonetic properties. And although linguists conditionally divide Swedish dialects into six main groups, in reality their number exceeds several hundred.

6. Historically, Swedes are not used to addressing each other as “you”. Regardless of the status and age of the interlocutor, they use the pronoun “you” when addressing him. The only exceptions are members of the royal family, who are usually addressed by their title or in the third person.

7. Until the 60s of the twentieth century, third person address was also used in relation to other interlocutors of high status. But then this tradition was abolished, as it made communication very difficult.

8. Swedish has no masculine or feminine gender. But there is general and average. The fact is that the forms of the masculine and feminine genders were so similar to each other that over time these two genders merged into one common one.

9. Swedish phonetics is very complex compared to Russian. Some Swedish vowels simply have no analogues in Russian. The meaning of words among Swedes often depends on the length or frequency with which individual sounds are pronounced.

10. In the Swedish language there are practically no sounds “Z” and “C”. They are found only in borrowed words, and even then the Swedes pronounce them in their own way.

11. Swedes do not like adjectives and prefer to complicate nouns instead of using them. So, phrases such as “horsepower”, “chocolate drink”, “air pollution” and “design changes” are translated into this language in just one word.

12. Unofficially, the Swedish language is divided into two subtypes - simple and complex. Most people do not use words such as “objective”, “execution”, “review”, “consistency” in their everyday speech and often do not even know their meaning. Therefore, in order to be considered an erudite person, you just need to add them to your vocabulary.

13. In the Swedish language there are absolutely no such familiar concepts as a Swedish wall, a buffet and a Swedish family. Moreover, modern Swedes have never even heard these expressions. They call a buffet a frame with crossbars, a buffet a sandwich table, and what we call a Swedish family is so rare in Sweden that it doesn’t have any name at all.

14. The Swedish language has a unique letter - “å”. It originated in the 16th century, when, as the Swedish language developed, the long “a” began to be read as an “o”. To make everything very clear, this phenomenon is reflected in the letter in the form of a small “o” placed above the letter “a”. Neighboring peoples, including the Norwegians and Danes, did not accept the new product and began to designate the long “a” as follows: “aa”. And although in the 20th century linguists finally introduced the letter “å” into these languages, the old norm is still found in the names of some localities. And one example of this is the Danish city of Aalborg. By the way, ignorance of Swedish phonetics was the reason that many Swedish names, surnames and place names entered the Russian language with an error. For example, the Swedish physicist Anders Jonas Ångström, whose name is pronounced Andesh Jonas Ångström, in Russia unwittingly became Anders Jonas Ångström.

15. The @ symbol, which we call a “dog,” is called “elephant” or “trunk” in Sweden.