Archive for 'Swedish Language'
Basic “maybe” sentences in Swedish: “kanske” Posted by Stephen Maconi on Feb 17, 2016
Maybe it’s a bird. Maybe it’s a plane. Or maybe it’s Superman! Knowing how to use “maybe” is very important in English. Likewise, knowing how to use kanske is very important in Swedish. Swedes use their kanske all over the place, so make sure you know it! Kanske is an easy concept, but the…
Looking good in Swedish: “att se ut” Posted by Stephen Maconi on Feb 11, 2016
Hejhej, Swedish learners! One of many things that we generally need to know how to talk about in a language is how something or someone looks. In English, there are two common patterns with “look” which are very much alike: Pattern 1: That cloud looks like a dog. Pattern 2: That cloud looks dark…
Going places without a “go” verb in Swedish Posted by Stephen Maconi on Feb 5, 2016
Swedish loves to cause lots of confusion when it comes to talking about going to places. There are lots of verbs which correspond to the English “to go”; to name a few: gå, åka, fara, sticka, ge sig iväg, and even dra (“to pull”) in some cases. But since there apparently aren’t enough verbs to talk…
Prepositions used with days of the week in Swedish Posted by Stephen Maconi on Feb 3, 2016
Prepositions are a pain. When I first started learning Swedish, I found Swedish prepositions so frustrating, because they often didn’t always match the English ones exactly. Or the Spanish ones. Or the German ones. Well, worry not! I’m here to save you from your preposition misery! This time, we’ll cover prepositions used with the…
Swedish Lego Soldiers Posted by Marcus Cederström on Jan 25, 2016
Lego was founded in 1932 in Billund, Denmark. The name of the company is a portmanteau combining the Danish words leg (play) and godt (well). Play well. Lego. Cute, right? But the word lego has existed in Swedish for quite some time, albeit in a much more sinister context. Legosoldat is the Swedish word for…
5 English words borrowed from Swedish Posted by Stephen Maconi on Jan 18, 2016
Borrowing vocabulary is no unusual linguistic phenomenon. Just look at English – there are French words all over the place! Most people know that a very large portion of English vocabulary is from other languages. Well, some of these thousands of words are, in fact, from Swedish! Here are 5 of them. Some, you…
What does it mean to “dive up” in Swedish? Posted by Stephen Maconi on Jan 13, 2016
Swedish is full of what we know as “phrasal verbs” in English – verbs that have an associated and required verb particle. Don’t get the linguistics jargon? It refers to verbs like “run out”, “calm down” and “show up”, where the first part is the verb, i.e. “show”, and the second part is a particle…