How I learned Swedish

There are many useful tools for learning languages and luckily most of them are available online - free!
All you need to do is sacrifice some of your time as often as you can and stay focused and motivated.



Here is how I did it:


Step 1

• Livemocha.com

perfect free learning tool for absolute beginners

Each lesson contains
- 40 new spoken and written words or sentences
- exercises:  review - write - speak (you can submit you exercises and get feedback from native speakers)

Besides, very good networking platform - get in touch with
- people learning the same language you do
- native speakers

! You need to create an account.

• Go Swedish on youtube  

A 25 year old Swedish girl with the sweetest voice you´ve ever heard, created a series of pretty good lessons for beginners. She repeats each word and sentence several times in normal speed and slowly. Very good to understand Swedish pronunciation.
The lessons are so much fun! In the beginning I listened to each one at least 20 times.. you must think I´m crazy, but in my mother tongue they say that "the repetition is the mother of knowledge".

! She also has an app for iPhone which is called Go Swedish Love Edition <3

•  Teach yourself Swedish book 

    There are plenty of good books to teach yourself Swedish. I chose one randomly, in a bookstore in Zürich and I was pretty pleased with the results.

This book, for example, has one text about Swedish culture, Sweden & swedes at the end of each chapter. Very nice!

! Important in my opinion: make sure that at the end of each lesson / dialog, there is a list of the new words with translation in your mother tongue. You don´t want to waist your time having to look them up in a dictionary.





OK! After a few weeks of doing all the above, you should be able to understand some words in Swedish.
Yeee! Finally some results. :-)
It´s time to start enjoying and learn half of the time passively - next Step!

Step 2

• listen to Swedish radio online 

RixFM (latest hits & talk shows) my favorite is the morning show: Rix MorronZoo
Bandit Rock (really good rock & metal music, not so many talk shows though)
Lugna Favoriter  (relaxing soft music) I almost never listen to this one
Radio 1 (talk shown & news only) very interesting shows, as soon as you start understanding a bit

Radio P1, P2, P3, P4 (mainly talk shows & news) on P3 you can listen to some music too.

Try them all and see which one you prefer.

! You can also find iPhone application for all these radios

•  watch online TV channels

Unless you live in Sweden and you can watch them all on tv, watching shows online is a good alternative.

great variety of shows, all from sports till news, talk shows and even kids shows (pretty useful to get you started)


Two of my personal favorites:

Gomorron Sverige (morning news / talk show)

Skavlan (entertainment talk show - the moderator is Norwegian, so there are subtitles every time he talks)

                                            
! On SvtPlay there is no advertisement before the show starts. Great!



 
nice "light" shows




Halv åtta hos mig (light entertainment, I watch this sometimes after work, when I´m too tired to focus on more serious stuff).

! Very useful: there are always subtitles, although the show is completely in Swedish.

• listen to Swedish music

You´ve probably heard that Swedes are pretty talented musicians, but there´s a lot more to discover besides ABBA, Roxette or The Cranberries.

Depending on the style you prefer, there is plenty of music on youtube to choose from.

! My tip: try to find youtube videos with lyrics

Not directly my style, but here is some music with pretty clear and easy to understand lyrics:

       

 http://www.oskarlinnros.se/

    

  http://www.danieladamsray.com/ 

 

http://www.septembermusic.se/

     

http://www.veronicamaggio.se/ 

• read online newspapers

Svenska Dagbladet

Aftonbladet

! You can also find iPhone application for all these newspapers

Step 3

• Find a language exchange partner 

 You can always find people interested in learning your language, or one of the languages you´re able to speak fluently. Post a short ad on one of the socializing online platforms in your town. 

I found my language exchange partner this way. Actually she found me. She was looking for someone to help her with her German and she could offer instead Swedish or English.

We met for a coffee 6 months ago and we are meeting weekly ever since. Usually 2 hours - we speak Swedish one hour and German the other one. It helps a lot!

This is a great way to start using what you´ve been learning. You can work on your pronunciation, learn to talk about yourself, what you did over the weekend, about plans for the holiday, etc. 

And best of all, if your exchange partner is a native speaker, you can learn some slang too. You don´t really find slang words in books.

So far so good! By now you should definitely be ready for the next step. Oh, just to let you know, I got to this point after about 6 months, it didn´t happen over night. ;-)

Step 4

• Read a book in Swedish

Of course you will no understand everything, but don´t worry. The more you read, the better you get. There´s hope!

So, in order to make this process easier, try to do what I did:
      Think of a novel you read recently in your mother tongue and you liked so much that you could read it again. Look it up online and check if there is a Swedish translation of the same novel.
Buy the book - see if there´s a Swedish audio book as well.


In my case, I had read Stieg Larsson´s - Verblendung, two years ago. It was by far the most thrilling novel I have ever read.


As you probably know, there is a movie made after this book. I bought the movie and watched it in German once, then watched it several times in Swedish.

I asked a Swedish friend to bring me the book and audio book from one of his trips home.
What I did was:
                 - listen several times to the first chapter
                 - then try to read it
(whenever I couldn´t understand a whole phrase, I checked it in the German book - the translation is really good)

While reading the first chapters I almost gave up. I read several other books in German in between, because I had really lost my patience. It was just so difficult to enjoy it.

I´m wondering now if it would have been easier to start with some short stories before going for a novel of over 500 pages.

Anyway, it worked pretty well eventually. The last two chapters were so easy to read and so enjoyable, that now I can honestly say it was worth the "pain".



Can´t really say where I stand right now with my Swedish. I think somewhere between level A2 and B1. Getting fluent is a matter of time, more hard work and listening to a lot of Swedish daily. 
I guess living in Sweden would help a lot. So, if you are lucky enough to already be there, enjoy this privilege and do your best!

Why Swedish?

People can have various reasons when they decide to start learning a language.

Most of the time you either need it for career advancement or travel, or you learn it even just for fun. And if the language you´re learning is not a common one like English or French, you might be often asked "why?".

I am part of a big expat community in Zürich, Switzerland and I am meeting new people every week. After the typical questions like "Where are you from?", "Have you been here for long?" or "What do you do?", you usually start talking about the life in Zürich, free time activities, hobbies, etc. People here are very much into outdoor activities, - Switzerland has beautiful landscape - so if you ask anyone during the winter about how they spent their weekend, they will most likely tell you they´ve been out skiing.

Well, in my case the answer would be "I´ve been home, learning Swedish". And here´s where the big question comes: "WHY Swedish?"

So, how do I explain why I spend so much of my time learning a language I might never use anywhere else but in Sweden?

Because I like it? Why do I like it? And why Swedish and not another language?

It happens very often that I try to explain why and I never have the feeling that anyone actually understands this.

If one person doesn´t understand you, it´s her/his problem. But if nobody understands, the problem might be on your side.

This is the reason why I decided to write a blog about learning Swedish, how I started and why after one year I am still very motivated, although I haven´t been to Sweden yet. So the next time someone asks me: "Why are you learning Swedish?" I will just say: "Read my blog" :-D

It all probably started back in my childhood, when instead of watching cartoons, I had to watch MTV at the only tv in the house, with my 5 years elder sister. I grew up with bands like Guns´n´Roses, Def Leppard, Metallica and even as I was older I kept on preferring rock music.

Later, internet made everything a lot easier. You could listen to new bands, read their lyrics, see where the members come from. Soon I discovered that most of the rock / metal groups I was listening to, came from Scandinavia. As music is a big part of every teenager´s life, I started developing a sort of fascination for the countries my favorite bands came from and thought that "when I grow up" I would like to live there.

There wasn´t anything specific about Sweden back then.

End of 2009, I decided to go abroad as an au pair. Of course a Scandinavian country would have been my first choice, but for multiple reasons which I will not mention here, I ended up in Switzerland. After a very short time of living here I knew that, if it all works well, I might stay here for good - I´m sure most of the expats in Zürich share the same feeling.

I had the chance to meet some very nice people and one of them recommended I should start reading in German in order to improve my language skills. She had a lot of books home, mostly Scandinavian crime novels, as she came from Scandinavia herself, from Denmark.

One of the first books I read in German was Stieg Larsson´s novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Verblendung - germ.). For those who haven´t read it yet, the action takes place in Stockholm, Sweden. I tried also reading novels written by authors from other countries, but there was something about the Scandinavian style that made me want to read more. It happened a few times that I forgot to get off at the right bus stop because I was too focused on my reading.

As my fascination for Scandinavia was growing, in October 2010 - exactly one year ago - I decided to go to a Swedish party. I remember, it was on a Thursday evening. I had read about it on an expat internet platform a few days before and I was already getting excited to meeting some Scandinavian people. I only met one, but it seems to have been enough. I spent the whole evening talking to Erik from Stockholm. I told him about all the cool things I knew about Scandinavia and how I was thinking of starting to learn one of the Scandinavian languages. Of course, he advised me to learn Swedish.. which is actually normal - if someone would come to me and say they´re thinking of learning an eastern-European language, I would say, learn Romanian!

We had brunch together a few days later, and that´s when I learned my first words in Swedish:
"Jag vill ha en öl." Erik thought it would be useful, if I go to Sweden, to be able to ask for a beer.

I realized how many similarities there are between German and Swedish, so I decided right then that it shouldn´t be that difficult for me to learn Swedish.

And here I am today, after one year, reading the last 10 pages of the same Stieg Larsson novel - this time in Swedish - Män som hatar kvinnor (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) ...

I really tried to compress the story as much as I could without leaving the important details aside. If you got to this last line, it means you had the patience to read the whole story. Do you understand now why???