When trying to explain the extent to which something has a certain property in Swedish, you’ll have to know the following grammar!

The extent to which something has a certain property – inside the nominal phrase

Using the word ‘such’ in such cases as ‘You have such a pretty house!’ is possible to say in Swedish, although maybe not how you English speakers would expect. You might translate the word ‘such’ directly to sådan(-t/-a) (sometimes incorrectly written sån(-t/-na)) and form the following sentence:

Du har sådant ett fint hus! – You have such a pretty house!

I’ll tell you right now that this grammar does not work in Swedish! You can, however, say the following:

Du har ett sådant (där) fint hus! – You have that kind of pretty house! or You have one of those pretty houses!

But this is not what we’re trying to say. No, we’re trying to say ‘You have such a pretty house!’. The grammar for this is actually much simpler:

Du har ett så fint hus!

You can roughly translate this directly to ‘You have a so nice house!’ It sounds funny in English, but it does work. So if you remind yourself to say it in Swedish in this funny but functional way, with absolutely no necessary conjugation for the word så, you’ll master the concept in no time! 😉

The extent to which something has a certain property – outside the nominal phrase

When you’re trying to describe to someone how big something is in English, for example, you often say a similar phrase to the following with a certain hand motion:

The pillow was about this big.

In Swedish, you can say the same thing. But instead of using den/det/de här for ‘this’ in this context, you use the term så här (sometimes written såhär):

Kudden var ungefär så här stor.

To say den här stor in this context, for example, is completely grammatically incorrect. So the bottom line is: ‘this big’, showing the extent to which something is big, is written så här stor(-t/-a). ‘That big’, as in ‘The pillow was about that big‘, is similarly written Kudden var ungefär så där stor.

In certain other contexts, such as ‘I didn’t think the pillow was that big‘, you say the following:

Jag trodde inte kudden var så stor.

Notice that I left out här/där here. That’s because in this case, I wasn’t showing how big the pillow was or comparing it to something—I was responding to how big someone else might have said the pillow was. This form can also be used, though, when showing with precise hand motions how big the pillow was—therefore functioning exactly as så här. This is a nuance you will learn as you hear more Swedish first-hand!

Also, don’t forget to conjugate your adjectives so that they match the nouns they describe! 😉

Hope this lesson was helpful. 🙂