24 European Country Names in Swedish Posted by Marcus Cederström on Jun 22, 2016
The 2016 UEFA European Championship in soccer is going on right now. In fact, Sweden plays in just a couple of hours against Belgium. By the time you read this, you’ll probably know who won. It’s been a while since Sweden did much on the international soccer stage. In fact, you have to go back…
Five Swedish Phrasal Verbs You Need to Know Posted by Marcus Cederström on Jun 20, 2016
About 15 years ago, I watched a lot of Comedy Central. And for whatever reason, a song by a guy named Rob Paravonian stuck with me. It’s about life. It’s about growing up. It’s about soul searching. And most important, it’s about particle board. The chorus begins “Particle board/All the furniture I own is made…
Swedish grammar: Conjunctions and subjunctions Posted by Stephen Maconi on Jun 15, 2016
In Swedish, there are three main conjunctions: och, eller, and men – “and”, “or”, and “but”, respectively. Conjunctions are grammatical words which are used to represent a connection between two words of the same kind. For example, en mor och en far – “a mother and a father”; glad men trött – “happy but tired”. Conjunctions…
“Myself”, “yourself”, etc. in Swedish Posted by Stephen Maconi on Jun 13, 2016
Many of you already know that Swedish employs reflexive verbs, just like in German or Spanish. For example, Albert rakar sig. – Albert is shaving. In the example, att raka sig means “to shave (oneself)”. It differs from att raka (i.e., without sig), in that it refers specifically to the subject shaving her/himself. Without…
Stylistic value of a word in Swedish Posted by Tibor on May 31, 2016
I guess you all have been learning a lot of vocabulary that you don’t repeat and don’t really know in which situation you shall use them. When is it “jättebra” and when is it “väldigt bra” An easy way to group the vocabulary of synonyms for example is to make an arrow or horisontal line and…
14 (More) Swedish Abbreviations You Need to Know Posted by Marcus Cederström on May 23, 2016
A long time ago in a blog post far, far away, we wrote 14 Swedish Abbreviations You Need to Know. We had several comments with additional, and important, abbreviations that you need to know. With that in mind, we thought it was time to put together another list of fourteen abbreviations that will help you…
Interjections I. in Swedish (to be continued) Posted by Tibor on Apr 25, 2016
Wow! Scandinavia is beautiful ! – you might say this after seeing this picture, but do you know how to react in Swedish? Something that makes the foreign language learning more idiomatic is the use of so called interjections. There is of course a whole bunch of them but I would like to introduce some…