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 Blueberry Soup Posted by Marcus Cederström on Jan 29, 2016
First, to clear things up, blåbärssoppa is technically made with bliberries. Bilberries, sometimes known as European blueberries, are the berries that Swedes call blåbär, which translates directly to blueberry. But blueberries that we find in the United States are not the same. I know. It’s all very confusing. The blåbär that you find in Sweden…
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…
Top 10 Swedish Posts of 2015 Posted by Marcus Cederström on Dec 31, 2015
For a lot of people, today is the last day of 2015, which means it’s time for the requisite retrospective. Let’s take a look at the top ten posts with the most visitors on the Swedish language blog. We’ll start at ten and work our way backwards to the most popular post of 2015. Swedish…
Swedish Christmas Food – Lutfisk Posted by Marcus Cederström on Dec 24, 2015
Swedes celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve—December 24. But that doesn’t mean they don’t take full advantage of the holiday. Come the end of November, you’ll start seeing restaurants, hotels, catering services all offering a julbord. Literally, Christmas table, a julbord is the Christmastime smorgasbord (another Swedish word, by the way) filled with food and drink…