What is it Like Learning Swedish?

The Swedish sometimes ask me what it is like as a foreigner learning Swedish, and if it is difficult. The Swedish and English language share a common north Germanic origin and learning Swedish from English is easier than learning other languages but it still takes time. It’s possible to learn in many different ways but I’ll describe some of the general concepts:

Learning Languages is Different as an Adult

Native speakers learn as a child through large volumes of exposure. As a child you might have a class of 20-30 hyperactive children talking to you all day, and a dedicated teacher. Then you go home and your parents talk to you. There is lots of lots of time and energy devoted to talking to you and correcting you and children learn over many years. A native speaker might learn the language without learning any of the underlying rules.

Learning as an adult it’s harder to learn using that method. Adults generally don’t like to correct adults, or be bothered by strangers who can barely be understood. As a result you’re instead going to have to put in dedicated time to learning. For example about 600 hours is often quoted as the instructor-led number of hours to reach a reasonable level in Swedish. You’re much more likely to learn by rules.

Language Learning Concepts

Going from one language, a lot of the first month or so felt like overcoming ignorance about languages. Here are some quickfire items for people with only one language:

You wont finish learning. There is no end, just improving.
“Fluent” isn’t measurable, instead there is a CEFR standard for measuring language ability.
Whilst the English pronunciation isn’t always obvious from the writing, in Swedish the letters almost always really help give the code for how to pronounce the words correctly.
Those “ä,å,ö” letters are separate letters and can’t be just ignored or swapped for a similar looking letter. Changing “å” to “a” is like changing an English “b” to a “d”. The letter “b” is not a pointless backwards “d”.
Some words can’t be 1 to 1 translated between languages. For example the “glue” words in a sentence might not map perfectly. Sometimes a Swedish word might be roughly used like a specific English word but other times used very differently.
Anytime Swedish seems to have a crazy rule, stop and think what English does. English probably does the same thing but you didn’t think about it until now.

Putting the Hours in

The most revision I’ve managed to do in a day is about 6 hours, and absorbing 50 new words a day – as in you can be exposed to more words but that’s how many I was getting correct using the apps to measure the learning progress. I felt like my head was going to melt.

If you work for a living and have other commitments, a good day is 1-2 hours Swedish study on a work day and 2-4 hours on weekends. Its hard to maintain that without burnout however.

Some time is used for maintaining your knowledge of the words you have already learnt. For progress I think a minimum of 30 minutes to 1 hour is important. Below this threshold there is a risk that you are not learning or even slowly forgetting words that you previously learnt.

If you take a break from it you can end up having to refresh a significant volume of words.

Mental Challenge

There are times you will get your confidence knocked. You’re going to meet occasional people that say English people can never speak Swedish properly. You will meet people that will look in disgust or laugh as you are trying to speak to them. It’s a case of having some mental fortitude, sticking to goals, and keep practising.

Difficulty Modifiers

If you are shy or otherwise perhaps neurodivergent in a way that affects talking to strangers, then that is going to make learning from conversations more stressful. You may want to learn in a controlled environment such as with a personal tutor or simply brute force the other learning methods to compensate.

Working at a job that is primarily English speaking is going to reduce exposure and increase the time to learn. To get a Swedish job is likely going to necessitate a CEFR B1 level of Swedish so there is a little chicken-and-egg situation to overcome.

Main Swedish Language Gotchas

For Swedish, the following were the most noticeable points. These are simplified laypersons descriptions for the purposes of this post for people that aren’t yet learning languages – there are more in-depth explanations of each point available on the internet:

Similar to how french has gendered “le” and “la” for things, Swedish has “en” and “ett” words. It’s not technically male and female but it is a similar scenario.
instead of using “the”, you modify a word ending. E.g. “katt” (cat) becomes “katten” (the cat).
in English a verb doesn’t change spelling if you’re thinking about doing something versus actually doing something (present tense). In Swedish the verb changes don’t map exactly to English, so you’ll get caught out on verb spelling. For example “gå” (to go) versus “går” (to go).
there is a pitch accent. If you ignore the pitch accent people will say “va?” a lot and make you repeat your sentence because they are expecting it as part of recognising the words.
The verb comes second in a sentence, which is the “v2 rule”. But this doesn’t mean the verb is the always literal second word. It means a sentence is [subject] [verb] but [subject] could be more than one word. It is also different in questions where the verb comes first.
The word order changes in specific situations when two sentences are joined together. Specifically the later part of a sentence (the dependent) changes.

Apps

Generally the web based and mobile apps are really helpful for building up an initial lump of known words, especially in periods when you might not otherwise be productive such as when commuting on a bus. For Swedish the apps I’ve used are DuoLingo, Mondly, and Memrise. They all have some quirks but will each provide a core of about 3000 words, with overlap between them.

DuoLingo uses Swedish versus American English. So “Pants” is different to the English “pants” and “downtown” gets mentioned a lot. Sometimes the translations don’t use the most obvious English equivalent word.

Mondly is more simplified and lets you start anywhere in the lesson structure.

Memrise has a main course similar to DuoLingo but also has a great speed review option.

Some of the new AI modules in each of these are interesting in that you essentially end up with an infinite conversational partner for reading and writing.

I would say the apps are good as introduction, practise, vocabulary building and for supplementing formal learning methods. They are great for learning to listen to a native speaker or for speaking, or for teaching the underlying language theory.

Books

People have learnt from books for years and the RivStart and Mål textbooks are common for Swedish learning. These are great for helping with the theory and setting a structure to learning, they are in Swedish however so combining them with a Swedish study book that is in English might help.

Childrens books for self-reading ages of 8 and above are great for improving reading speed and word exposure. I’d get them second-hand from a loppis or second hand from an auction site like blocket.se. Don’t tell the seller why you are buying the book, as they wont share your enthusiasm.

Teachers

Language teachers can be good but you need to be prepared for the professional teachers to use terms specific to language structure such as.

“why did you use the present verb instead of the infinitive?”
“which preposition should be used in this sentence?”
“You haven’t switched the adverb position”
all the above but in Swedish of course

If you aren’t familiar with these terms, then you now have two things to learn – Swedish and language theory terms. Trying to build a reply, translate it, reshuffle the word order and think about the classification of the words to check for errors in your response can be a real brain-freezer at first.

SFI

SFI is a free service, “Swedish For Immigrants” provided by the local council/municipality (kommune) in each area. Some people seem to talk about SFI as if it is magic and that you can’t learn Swedish without going to it, or that you just sign up to it and magically are done. In reality it is an instructor-led group learning environment. Group learning can be good or bad; I generally get more distracted when learning in a group.

It used to be that you had to take the day off work and catch the bus there to the local kommune location which made it fine if you were out of work but difficult if you were in work. There are now a couple of regions that deliver it online.

People

Common advice from people that haven’t learnt a language as an adult, is usually that you should “just speak it”, or “just go out and talk to people”.

The professional linguists will instead say to train to CEFR B1 before going to talk to native speakers as it’s other wise hard to extract learning points from a broken conversation, especially one that is stressful for both parties. This is because most adults will never correct you or it can be socially awkward when they do. Adults you encounter in daily life also have a job to do and might not want to be the on-the-spot teacher for a random stranger.

A common bit of advice that might work is to talk to drunk people, retired people, and children (or good friends).

Films

Watching films is often suggested but studies suggest the learning rate is one of the lowest, at about 1% of words, and once the English subtitles are turned on it actually gets worse, to almost zero.

YouTube

YouTube can be great for listening skills and copying pronunciation. As a break from other methods I sometimes play a Swedish song video and use the YouTube controls to set it to 0.85 speed and then sing along to the words. I do know someone that has learnt Swedish mostly from listening to native speakers on YouTube using the playback speed controls and the subtitles, but they are fairly unique.

Games

Sadly there isn’t much in the way of games to help learn Swedish. There are various games set in Sweden, but they don’t involve much Swedish speech or text. A well-known example is Generation Zero, which is set in Sweden but with almost no speech to listen to for the entire game.

There is a game for learning via immersion called Language Learning FPS which is interesting. The range of vocabulary is limited but uses immediate reward/punishment feedback to teach movement, symbols, colours, and numbers which it trains via puzzle solving rather than translation. The total range of words feels quite low at perhaps less than 100, and there have been no updates since early 2023 but the developers have said they want to provide more content in the future. I found it good for discovering what my basic speech recognition skills were like under stress – I found my spoken number recognition has a thinking-delay on similar sounding numbers when I’m typing desperately on a keypad as enemies close in. It’s not a significant source of learning by itself but might be a nice break from the relentless mobile apps and flashcards.

Best Method

Its different between people but the best method is likely to be a combination of apps, books, instructor led tuition (group or individual) and speaking with native speakers in an environment where they have time and patience for you.