There’s a lot that Swedish and English have in common. There is plenty of similar vocabulary – dag means “day”, skyskrapa means “skyscraper” – and plenty of similar expressions as well. One word that is a false cognate – a faux ami – is the Swedish verb vilja. Its present form is vill, and it does not mean “will”.

The Swedish verb vilja actually means “to want”. So, if you hear someone say:

a. Jag vill åka till Spanien nästa sommar.

they don’t mean “I will go to Spain next summer.”. They actually mean to say:

b. “I want to go to Spain next summer.” √

The verb vilja is conjugated like so:

infinitive: (att) vilja
present: vill
past: ville
present perfect: har velat
past perfect: hade velat

Vilja takes no infinitive marker (att) before the verb that follows it. The example (a.) above illustrates this perfectly:

c. Jag vill åka till Spanien nästa sommar.

As you can see, we say vill åka and not vill att åka.

So far, we have talked about wanting to do something. This is really all you need, because vill must (almost) always be followed by a verb. In English, both of these sentences are correct:

d. “I want to go to Spain.”
e. “I want a car.”

In example (e.), “want” is followed by a noun. This is not allowed in Swedish. To say you want something (or someone), you have to add the verb ha, “to have”. So, examples (d.) and (e.) are translated to Swedish like this:

f. Jag vill åka till Spanien.
g. Jag vill ha en bil.

In other words, with (g.), you are really saying “I want to have a car.”. The best way to memorize this is to learn vill as meaning “to want to“, rather than just “to want”. It will remind you that you need a verb after it, since you can’t say “I want to a car.” – no, you “want to have a car“.

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