There are lots of people out there who really want to learn a new language, and Sweden often comes up as a suggestion on many websites as a language being ‘close’ to English. Well, no one’s lying – they belong to the same language family (the Germanic languages) and they have a great deal of common loan words from French, Latin, and even from each other.

Not only do the two have much similar vocabulary; the sentence structure is also very similar, at least if compared with other languages from other or even the same language family. What is very different, though is pronunciation and some grammatical principles.

So, here are three things that make Swedish easy to learn for English speakers:

1. Some amount of similar vocabulary (though with some false friends as well)
2. Similar sentence structure
3. Easy spelling (for the most part)

Three things that might be challenging, though, are these:

1. Noun gender (common gender and neuter gender)
2. Conjugation of nouns and adjectives based on gender and number
3. Pronunciation – Swedish has 9 vowels, and each has a long and short form (see Vowels, Part 1 and Part 2); 18 consonant sounds of which 3 don’t exist in English (r, tj, and sj)

But really, these more ‘difficult’ things are really only technical. Sure, you’ll sound less learned if you get any of them wrong, but you will still be able to communicate and the Swedes will appreciate your effort. 🙂 So don’t let it stop you – instead, let it start you!