I’ve been trying to learn Swedish for about a year and started really pushing hard in June spending an hour ish per day. I’m A2 early B1 level but my grammar is just awful. I mess up verb order all the time or mess up infinitive, past, present and supine forms. I text with my Swedish friend every day so I’m practicing often but I’m feeling so discouraged that I’m not retaining/developing the automaticity for the verb order. I know the rules! But my brain just doesn’t implement them when I’m just chatting casually with my friend.

Was there anything that really helped the sentence structure to click for you? I had hoped that reading out loud might help with pattern recognition but I’ve read ~1000 minutes (I keep a log) in the last two months and I’m not picking up the pattern from that or writing sentences out.

Would love any insight or advice. 🙏🏼🙏🏼

Hi! I’m trying to make a discord server for my girlfriend and I to chat in together, and I thought it’d be cute if I named the channels in her native language! I’d like to do my best with the extremely limited Swedish I know but I’m way too limited to actually do it on my own.

I’ve tried looking up some of the words online but I realized that some of them way seem awkward/formal or be plain incorrect for the context I’m using them in.

It’d be a great help if I could have the following words/phrases translated in whichever way you believe it best suiting!

Chatting, Images, Art, Writing, Translations, Language Questions, Complaining, Gaming, Streaming, (+ whatever else you think may be useful that I may’ve overlooked!)

I'm attending the funeral of my husband's grandfather who lives in Sweden. I've only met most of the family once previously. What would be the best way for me to tell the family "I'm sorry for your loss?" Also a pronunciation guide would be extremely helpful! Tack!

Hi everyone,

I’m studying Swedish prosody, specifically the focal accent (fokalaccent / big accent / sentence accent).

These are the cases I currently know of where a word typically receives focal accent:

- New information (answer to a wh-question)

- Broad focus / all-new sentence

- Narrow focus

- Contrastive focus

- Corrective focus

- Focus on the subject (or other non-final element)

- Polarity / verum focus

- Intensification / emphasis

- Enumeration (list items)

- Second Occurrence Focus

- Contrastive topic

- Expression focus vs denotation focus

- Open vs closed focus

My question is:

Are there important additional types or contexts of focal accent in (Central) Swedish that I’m missing? Or does this list already cover the main ones?

Thanks in advance!

Hejsan

Jag är en överoptimistisk bokköpare och hämtade nyligen en ny, svensk översättning av några av Shakespeares pjäser (Dramer I Färga Skräcken Röd). Jag ögnade genom introduktionen och blev lite besviken att den inte verkade prata så mycket om översättningsmetodiken.

Shakespeare är ju känd för att använda ett särskilt diktmått och jag hoppades läsa hur översättaren, Ulf Peter Hallberg, valt att anpassa den till svenska. Jag är tyvärr inte kunnig nog om diktmått för att förstå anpassningen bara av att läsa texten. Så jag vänder mig till det mäktiga Reddit och hoppas få svar på min fråga, hur är Shakespeares diktmått anpassad till svenska?

Bonuspoäng om någon även vet hur den förra översättaren från 1800-talet som nämns i introduktionen - Carl August Hagberg - gjorde samma sak.

Tack på förhand för all hjälp.

Weird question, especially for my first post, but hopefully someone here is a BJJ nerd like me :) since I’m learning Swedish, I was wondering if the terms they have for the moves & positions in jiu-jitsu are the same as in English, close to what we know them as, or completely different. I speak Portuguese, so I’ll give an example: in English, what we call “side control” they call “cem quilos” In Portuguese, which means “100 kilos”. That would be an example of a complete difference. Some things are the same: Mount position is the same in both languages. Anyone have any insight on the Swedish side?

Hej! I learned Swedish through SFI myself, and I now run a free practice tool for people preparing for the SFI tests. In September about 4,000 people practised with it, around 3,600 hours in total.
Looking at the answers of the 2,530 who save their progress, five patterns stood out.

1. Where "inte" goes in a bisats

In a main clause the verb comes second and "inte" after it: Han kommer inte. In standard Swedish, after att, eftersom, om and the like, "inte" moves in front of the verb: Jag vet att han inte kommer. 64% of learners who saw that question got it wrong at least once. The same goes for alltid, aldrig and ofta: Jag vet att hon alltid dricker kaffe (54% missed it).

2. Adjective endings

ett stort hus (59% missed), det röda huset (59%), det största huset (78%) and tre små barn (59%). The adjective agrees with the noun: -t with an ett-word, -a in the plural and the definite form, and liten becomes små in the plural.

3. Tricky plurals

en lärare, två lärare: 80% missed that en-words ending in -are don't change in the plural. Also ett äpple, tre äpplen (51%) and the definite plural nycklarna (57%).

4. Small linking words

varken ... eller, neither ... nor (79% missed), där in Staden där jag bor (75%), vars, whose (60%), and så att, so that (61%).

5. The verb stays second when something else comes first

På torget finns det en marknad varje lördag (50% missed). Put a time or a place first, and the subject moves after the verb: finns det, not det finns.

Two runners-up: 47% picked the wrong verb form in Igår ___ jag lunch med min vän (it's åt), and 47% didn't choose i in Jag har bott i Sverige ___ tre år.

Does this match what you found hardest?

Hello, everyone! I hope you’re all doing well.

I’d like to know whether the pitch accent 2 of certain words can disappear or become less noticeable in connected speech. How should I pronounce the sentence “Den glada flickan äter den goda pizzan”?

I can’t seem to hear pitch accent 2 in glada or goda. Can it become weaker or cease to be clearly realized in this context? I’ve been trying to pronounce the lexical pitch accent of each word individually, but that doesn’t seem to sound natural.

At least 2-3 word have the wrong definition every time I take the quiz.

Hi all, I came across these two abbreviations while researching in the 1700s Visnums parish records. I have never seen them before, and I can't seem to find abbreviations that matches. These are on the far left side of the page, in the column where titles like "drang" or "pig" are usually listed. Does anyone with a better understanding and/or recognition of gothic swedish writing have any ideas? Thank you in advance!

Link to full page

I´m a Spanish native speaker and I am learning Swedish at a B2 level. The fact is that I feel that I´m stuck at this level and I do not feel any progress even if I study every day. I know that my Swedish is not perfect and I know I´m capable to master the language at a C2 level (I also want to master it to complete my studies in that country). When I speak to my friends in Swedish I feel that most of my expressions are too generic like if I an AI chatbot with no personality, and unable to acquire the slang words they use.
Any advices?

Someone shared an app or website that corrects your Swedish grammar and spelling.
It was fantastic, but I lost track of it and can’t remember how I accessed it.

Thank you!

PS Bonus question, I just bought the Rivstart A1/A2 books. I saw a couple of SFI YouTubers use them, do you have a favourite channel?

Hej allihopa! Jag försöker återuppliva min svenska för tillfället och jag behöver lite hjälp.
Just nu tittade jag på en video som handlade om användning av prepositioner. I den framställde man den här mening: vi får ta en glass för mamma, vilket betydde "mamma tillät oss att ta en glass".
Så jag undrade vad skillnaden mellan av och för är. Men när jag googlade, hittade jag inga exempel med för. Dessutom, när jag söker vi får ta en glass för mamma, svarar google ai vill du bjuda din mamma på en glass? Så... motsatsen till vad videon menade.

Min fråga är: använder man ens för i meningar som den här? När man får lov att göra nåt av nån ska man då säga av, för eller nåt annat?

Tack!

Do you use the word "prylsamhälle"? If so, what would the nearest English equivalent be - consumer society, throw-away society?

Hello everyone! I am totally new to Swedish, I started on Duolingo but I think it’s not sufficient
Do you have any recommendations for free sites? Also I don’t know with what to start, should I start with words, grammar, listening??
I am lost, please help😬

Is it just me, or is there a sense of a “ghost r” when retroflexes are pronounced? Examples: kort, bord, barn.

I came across a mention of something called r-coloring in my research, that is, an r that seems to be there, but isn’t. Anyway, I believe the r is deleted in these cases, but perhaps the movement of the tongue after the vowel creates this sensation.

Thank you all!

Hej tillsammans,
jag kan prata svenska på B1-nivå, men min hörförståelse är så dålig att jag kan inte riktigt använda det. När jag har studerat i Sverige för sex månader jag behövde att byta till engelska så ofta, bara eftersom jag förstådd inte.

Hur öva ni hörförståelsen? Kanske med poddarna?

I've noticed that the Swedish ö sometimes seems to sound more open before r, almost like an open e. Is this a real phonetic feature of Swedish pronunciation, or am I just imagining it? For example, does the vowel sound different in words like höra or röra compared with words where ö isn't followed by r?

I'd appreciate any explanations or examples!