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!