Tag Archives: Grammar
The Days of the Week in Swedish Posted by Marcus Cederström on Nov 28, 2011
I was reading through some of our older posts here and realized it had been quite some time since we got down to some of the basics. The days of the week. And the months. Luckily for you, Tibor did an amazing job of explaining the Time Adverbs with certain tenses. It’s a great way…
The Swedish Future Tense Posted by Marcus Cederström on Nov 4, 2011
One of the first things we learn as new language learners is the present tense. It’s incredibly useful and allows us to describe exactly what we are doing, right now. Of course, in everyday conversation, describing what we are doing right now is not used as much as a first year Swedish learner might like…
V.g. avg. i e.m. Posted by jennie on Dec 15, 2009
Let’s be honest, there’s no fun and exciting way to talk about abbreviations. But they can be tricky and it is quite easy to become Swenglish when there’s an abbreviation involved. So, let’s get this over with, shall we? Useful Swedish abbreviations and where you would see them: ank. = ankommande = arrival, arriving Ank. tåg från Stockholm Train arriving from Stockholm…
Particles of Position and Direction Posted by Transparent Language on Sep 5, 2009
Uhuh, I knew this day would come. I knew that sooner or later someone would email me asking about the difference between “hemma” and “hem” and “hemifrån”. “Ute” and “ut”, and “inne” and “in”. Yeah, you get the picture… It’s not very exciting stuff (hey, I’d much rather write about the lovely city of Lund)…
Dem Pesky Personal Pronouns Posted by Transparent Language on Aug 26, 2009
The other day I got an email asking me to clarify which form of the third person plural personal pronoun (that would be the Swedish equivalent of “they” in English) was correct. The question, of course, was about “de” and “dom”. Hmmm… it’s an interesting question. Both of those words are pronounced the same –…
What’s the deal with själv? Posted by Transparent Language on Aug 16, 2009
I was talking to an American gal who teaches Swedish (in the US) the other day and there was one thing she said that just stopped me dead in my tracks. And that was “själv is a reflexive pronoun.” What? Please don’t tell me this is what teachers of Swedish in the US tell their…
To Learn Grammar or Not? That is the Question! Posted by Transparent Language on Jul 15, 2009
Recently I’ve been having quite a lot of discussions about grammar. I don’t know why – it just simply started to come up in conversations all of a sudden. And you’d think that grammar would be a sure conversation killer, right? After all, who wants to discuss the finer points of subordinate clauses in a…