“Swedish – An Essential Grammar” – book review Posted by Transparent Language on Feb 13, 2009 in Grammar
“Swedish – An Essential Grammar”
Authors: Philip Holmes and Ian Hinchliffe
Published by Routledge
ISBN: 0-415-16048-0
I totally forgot I had this book. Yesterday I was cleaning out some stuff and whoops, it just fell out of the box and hit me on the head.
I think I packed it away because once upon a time I really didn’t care for it all that much. What turned me off was the language in this book. It’s highly specialized. You need to really know your grammar and grammatical terms to make sense of the explanations in this volume. Otherwise you’ll be stuck trying to make sense of such sentences:
“Some indeclinable adjectives may be used either attributively or predicatively.” Or
“Often the separated forms are concrete and the integral forms abstract in meaning.” Yeah, like, totally.
But I guess in the last few years my tolerance for this sort of language has dramatically increased (living in Sweden will do that to you) and this morning I’ve started to read this book again. And I have to say that despite the sometimes tedious explanations, this is a wholly excellent book.
True, sometimes you may need someone to explain things to you using simple words shorter than three syllables. But apart from that, this is a great Swedish grammatical reference.
It covers everything that needs to be covered, it’s very well organized (always a plus in a grammar book) and gives you more examples of the stuff it explains than you’ll ever need.
In short: to buy or not to buy? Definitely – to buy.
Two thumbs up!
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Comments:
ceci:
definitely! in my case, ilove my svenska spanska grammar, it is the book of my dream…really, it is so necesary!
good weekend anna
ceci
Peter Miller:
Hej Anna
How about a post on Swedish Music Videos on the internet. Who are the popular artists that sing på svenska?
I found some funny UTube vidoes by Swedens Henrik Schyffert, a series in svenglish so go to”Svenskt Näringslv” on UTube and enjoy.
Minty:
Hej Anna,
Too much grammar, not enough culture! No I do like the grammar, but I don’t remember all those terms about grammar in english…like the sentence “Some indeclinable adjectives may be used either attributively or predicatively.” means nothing to me!
I would love a post on popular muscians! One I have been fond of recently is Robyn’s “with every heartbeat” which has been remixed onto Ministry of Sound. I also like Roxette “listen to your heart”.
Another post I’d like to see is on swedish inventors/inventions. I keep hearing that they’re an ingenious bunch, but missing all the cool stuff theyve made. Other than IKEA of course which is a given haha!
Love this blog by the way, keep it up.
Minty.
david martin:
I think that the best way to learn or improve the english grammar is to keep practice on it!
To talk with people during the day it will definitely improve it faster 🙂