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Uppcon – Scandinavia’s largest anime and cosplay convention Posted by Stephen Maconi on Jun 15, 2012
Since 2002, fans of anime and cosplaying and other Japan-related topics have flocked to Uppsala, Sweden every year for Scandinavia’s largest Asia-related convention: Uppcon! It started off as a simple film screening at Slottsbiografen, a cinema located inside the Castle of Uppsala, where about 50 people attended the first year. Just three years later, the…
How to ache in Swedish Posted by Stephen Maconi on Jun 8, 2012
Well, it’s probably not something that most people like to think about, but at some point in your life you will get some sort of headache, stomachache, or even throat-ache (which, of course, is called a sore throat in English). And if you’ve accustomed yourself to speaking Swedish in every situation without exception (the way…
Loreen goes to the Eurovision Grand Final! Posted by Stephen Maconi on May 25, 2012
All of us in 30-degree (86 Fahrenheit) Sweden are very proud of our winner of Melodifestivalen, Sweden’s contest to choose its entry in the Europe-wide Eurovision Song Contest, and her continuous success with her song “Euphoria“. Last night, Loreen was voted by 50% jury and 50% televoting to go to the Grand Final, scheduled for…
The history of Swedish loan words Posted by Stephen Maconi on May 18, 2012
The Swedish language has a long history of loaning words from other languages in Europe. Usually, the source languages have been of large economic or cultural importance for Sweden. This process of loaning words started around the 10th century AD, just a century after historians consider the Swedish language to have become a language of…
Finland in the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest Posted by Stephen Maconi on May 11, 2012
How does Finland have anything to do with Sweden? Well, first-off, the two countries neighbor each other, even though most of the “border” between them is actually the Gulf of Bothnia (Bottniska viken in Swedish). Secondly, the Swedish language is one of Finland’s two official languages – the other being, of course, Finnish. There is…
The easy and hard about Swedish Posted by Stephen Maconi on May 4, 2012
There are lots of people out there who really want to learn a new language, and Sweden often comes up as a suggestion on many websites as a language being ‘close’ to English. Well, no one’s lying – they belong to the same language family (the Germanic languages) and they have a great deal of…
False friends between Swedish and Norwegian Posted by Stephen Maconi on Apr 25, 2012
As you may or may not know, the Swedish and Norwegian languages are very closely related. They have only been separate languages since around 800 AD, when Swedish is considered by historians to have become its own language. Therefore, a large majority of words are nearly the same, or at least interpretable. There are also…