I’m starting to learn Swedish with the help of “Sænsk málfræði” (Swedish Grammar) by Sigrún Helgadóttir Hallbeck. I checked it out at the city library, and as I find grammar textbooks the easiest thing to read in Icelandic, I decided to put up a word list here.

The example sentences are actual sentences taken out of the Swedish textbook, so you can see how the words are used. If you go to Iceland to learn Icelandic in a serious class like the BA course at the University of Iceland, you’ll need to know these words because they’ll be teaching you entirely in Icelandic (and your textbooks will most likely be in Icelandic too).

Sérhljóð – vowel
Samhljóð – consonant
Samhljóðasamband – consonant combination
Áhersla – stress/emphasis as in “In Icelandic the stress is on the first syllable of a word”.
Nafnorð – noun
Kyn – gender. I’ve already showed this in an earlier post, with karlkyn (masculine gender), kvenkyn (feminine), and hvorugkyn (neuter).
Ákveðinn greinir – definite article (the word “the”). Indefinite article (the words “a, an”) is the same but “óákveðinn” instead.
Brottfall – elision and apocope. Example, “gamall – gamlar”. The second l involves apocope.
Beyging – “bending”, conjugating and declining. You can tell what “beygingarendingar” means.
Föll – cases.
Lýsingarorð – adjective.
Sagnorð – verb.
Atviksorð – adverb.
Aukafall – oblique case (þolfall, þágufall eða eignarfall). Nefnifall isn’t in the “aukafall” group.

There’s the main ones. Now for some example sentences:

Flest orð, sem eru karlkyns og kvenkyns í íslensku, eru samkynsorð í sænsku.
Most words that are masculine and feminine in Icelandic are common gender in Swedish. (samkyn is both masculine and feminine genders, but not neuter. I looked it up real quick and supposedly it’s called “common gender”?)

Nafnorðum er skipt niður í 5 beygingarflokka eftir því hvaða endingar þau fá í fleirtölu.
Nouns are divided into 5 declination groups according to which endings they get in (the) plural.

Ef nafnorðið er hvorugkynsorð, fær lýsingarorðið endinguna -t.
If the noun is a neuter word, the adjective gets the -t ending.

Skrifaðu í eyðurnar fleirtölumyndina af orðunum til vinstri.
Write in the blanks the plural form of the words to the left.

Swedish is a lot easier to learn than Icelandic in terms of grammar. For the most part there’s just two cases instead of four, and there’s two genders instead of three. Verbs don’t conjugate according to person. Scandinavian (Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian) are the easiest Nordic languages for English-speakers to learn, then Faroese, Icelandic, Finnish, and (hardest) Greenlandic. Greenlandic is partially the hardest because there’s almost no modern learning materials for it, most are in Danish and from before their orthography reform.

Here’s an in-complete (and in the case of Greenlandic and Faroese, possibly wrong) Swadesh list for the main Nordic languages. If you have corrections, let me know so I can fix it. The words chosen might not be the most common word used but are the ones that sound most similar (and still mean the same) as in the other languages.