Swedish

Here I decided to summarize the resources which I’ve been using for studying Swedish, in a hope that someone will find this page helpful. Comments and constructive criticism are more than welcome.

Grammar

The first purely grammatical resource I used during the studies was the Wikipedia article on Swedish grammar. As I was progressing, I complemented it with Swedish: An Essential Grammar from the Routledge series, which has been serving me perfectly ever since.

The most puzzling topic for me was the word order, so I recommend not to spare time on it.

Reading

Karlsson på taket is the only book I’ve read so far, and since it’s somewhat hard to read normal Swedish books in the beginning, I used the version, adapted using Ilya Frank’s method.

Adapted text is basically the original text, where every paragraph is repeated twice: at first with a (Russian) translation after every few words, and then only in the language of the original, eg.:

Jag heter Jon (my name is John, heter = to be named), och du (and you)?


Jag heter Jon, och du?

Using it together with an audio version of the book should make the learning process even more efficient.

Dictionaries

I primarily use Folkets lexikon, that used to be called Lexin back in the day, and can translate between Swedish and a handful of other languages.

Some people recommend tyda.se as better English-Swedish bidirectional alternative. Google Translate’s dictionary is good too, but the lack of the grammatical gender makes it impractical for independent use.

Vocabulary acquisition

In the very beginning I learned a couple of words and pronunciation basics using Rossetta Stone, but after a dozen of lessons ditched it. That was the only dedicated word memorization I did for Swedish, and I don’t even keep a vocabulary.

I wanted Swedish to be my experiment on how far can you get without spending time on learning words by rote. We’ll see.

Courses and excercises

My lead-in to the language was Björn Engdahl’s Swedish Course.

I also did 7 lessons of the FSI Swedish Basic Course, which is much more comprehensive and comes with recordings for the lessons, but found it to be extremely boring. Don’t get me wrong here, this course does a really good job, but you need to be more self-disciplined than I am.

Note taking

As I mentioned above, for the most part, my excercising is made up of communication. I’ve asked some of the people with whom I communicate to correct my mistakes.

When there is an error in a phrase, I put that phrase in my workbook, stike out the erroneous part with a red pen and write the same part corrected above. Old-fashioned, but I feel it helps a lot.

In the course of eight months I took around 200 pages of notes like that.

Communication

As a famous saying goes, practice makes perfect. So, among other things, communication gets most of my attention.

My main media of communication are email, IRC and the polyglot community. I have a microblog at Lang-8, but only made a post or two.

Short-term real-life meetings with Swedish speakers help a lot with the language, but even more with the motivation.

Postscriptum

Thanks to all those who help me in learning Swedish, the language which will hopefully lead me to become a mighty viking.