If you’ve kept up with my copious social postings, you’ll know that I’ve spent the last week in beautiful Malmö, following my Eurovision language dreams. Perhaps not the calmest of years to choose – the contest itself was mired in controversies that just seemed to be compounded by poor decision after poor decision. At times, the atmosphere felt incredibly on edge. Needless to say, the joy that was Switzerland’s Nemo winning was the tonic we all needed.
As for my language goals, though, it’s been a blast.
I put all that to the test this week. And I think I can finally say, without piquing my impostor syndrome to breaking point, that I speak Swedish. Ja, äntligen pratar jag svenska! Granted, coffee shop counters have been the main playground for my newfound skills, but with each interaction I’ve felt more and more confident using it.
Avoiding (Un)Helpful hands
One obstacle I was very wary of at first was the helpful English-speaker. You know the type if you’ve been to a country with really strong, widespread anglophone knowledge. You try out your target language, only to get English back at you by default. It’s often enough to scare you back into your shy language learner box and accept defeat.
In Malmö, however, it didn’t happen once. That’s perhaps more to do with my obsessive fascination with mimicry, rather than Malmoans’ inherent desire to help learners of Swedish. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to Swedish podcasts and watching Swedish series to train my ear. Then, in my spare time, I’ve rehearsed speaking phrases out loud, laying it on thick with the accent and paying particular attention to the Swedish tones. I’d clown around with it, role-playing an authentic Swede. Melodifestivalen introductions were particularly fruitful ground for this – låt nummer ett : Carola! I’d pronounce in the shower, in my finest continuity announcer svenska.
It may all sound completely bonkers, but it worked a treat. I ended up sounding decent enough for Swedes to assume I had a better grip of the language than I probably (certainly) do, but it stopped the dreaded automatic-switch-to-English, and gave me more precious time practising with real people. Once my level became apparent and the deception was revealed, I could hop in with a jag lär mig svenska (I’m learning Swedish), which resulted in some nice compliments and occasionally, a new word or two explained by the other party. My favourite was vispgrädde, whipped cream, explained by a very patient and lovely Espresso House barista!
So, I’ve come out of my Swedish adventure with a refreshed appreciation of accent-training as an indispensable part of any language learning regime. Podcast-shadowing, talking to yourself, singing in the shower – however daft it feels, it just works. Give it a go if you’re sceptical – I bet you’ll be surprised.
The only thing I have to do now is relearn how to speak Norwegian again without sounding Swedish…
If you didn’t already know, I’ve been spending a year Swedifying my Norwegian. The goal? Eurovision fun days in Malmö, of course. And as the final test of my newfound svenska draws close, it seems like a good time to take stock of what – and how – I’ve been learning.
I’m a big fan of finding content that speaks to you, be that books or television and film. Personally, I’m much more likely to keep coming back to learning content if I find it fun. With that in mind, and through much trial and error, I’ve found some things that I love in Swedish – things that have made my Swedish journey so much more effective.
Here are some of the biggies from my past twelve months!
Crime Fiction
It bears repeating: extensive reading is one of the most sure-fire ways to solidify your familiarity and ease with a foreign language. It’s the vastness of the input – as you soak up a story, things are bound to stick. And this particular genre was a bit of a no-brainer, as I also loved crime fiction in my original scandilang, Norwegian (check our Jørn Lier Horst – the author of the first novel I read completely in Norwegian, Blindgang).
Thanks to a nice little Swedish section at the London branch of Foyles, I found one I liked the look of – Benvittring by Johan Theorin – and have been tiptoeing through that for the last few moths. It has all the dark, moody suspense we’ve come to love with Scandi noir, and fits neatly into a series – the Ölandssviten books – if I want more when I come to the end (and I will – it’s great). Maybe it’s because the genre is so formulaic, but it all seems so familiar – Horst and Theorin could be writing cousins.
Although a few of Theorin’s works have been translated in English, unfortunately Benvittring hasn’t, yet. That does give me the sense that I’m one of the first outside Sweden to read it, which feels very special and exclusive. The downside, of course, is that I can’t recommend it to friends who don’t speak the language.
Now, I love some light listening in the morning when I’m going about my bits and pieces. Something chatty and informal, that you can have on in the background and selectively drop into, much like picking at a smörgåsbord (which, incidentally, means sandwich table in Swedish). Swedish Radio‘s first station, P1, fits the bill perfectly – lots of opinion-piece phone-ins, interesting documentaries, the odd overacted melodrama, and hourly bulletins to satisfy the news junkie in me.
Better still, Swedish Radio is available as a third-party skill on Alexa, and I do love to recruit my digital assistants as language learning buddies. So it’s as easy as putting my morning coffee on and exclaiming Alexa, play Swedish Radio to get some listening practice on. I let my attention dip in and out of it as I go about my other business, and I haven’t done any structured or focused listening with it. But it’s been fundamental in re-tuning my ear to the shape of Swedish – vital as someone hopping over from a very closely related language.
Young Royals
Now I know I’m not alone here, and I’m in much larger company than other Swedish learners. The Netflix coming-of-age drama Young Royals depicts the blossoming romance between Crown Prince Wilhelm and classmate Simon, and has been a bit of a breakout sensation. There’s even an official Spotify playlist, which has introduced me to new music much more with it than I can admit to being. Think The Crown, but cooler (and probably no less made up).
The show’s popularity has led many to the language, too. There are whole Reddits about Young Royals sparking a Duolingo obsession. Despite that, the next-best thing – after it being in Swedish, of course – is that there’s a dubbed English version too, so I can recommend it to non-linguaphile friends and family.
What’s more, once you watch, and rate, a Swedish-language show on Netflix, you’ll have more recommended to you. Thanks to my Young Royals binge, I’ve discovered a whole lot more Swedish content on the platform since.
Drag Race Sweden
Staying with the queer theme, here, I credit the fabulous Drag Race Sweden with one very useful power-up: colloquialisms. Not the odd idiom here and there, but the whole gamut of real, everyday, lived Swedish spoken between friends. The language used between the competing queens is so informal that it’s an antidote to the staid dialogues of standard text books. It’s thanks to that – along with the accompanying Swedish subtitles – that I’ve learnt vocab like taggad (psyched) and peppad (stoked) and so much other emotive language that is totally transferrable to the Eurovision context. Yes, in Malmö I’ll be sharing my colloquialised opinions left, right and centre, and it’s all thanks to Robert Fux. That’s not to mention the catchphrases… Må besta quinna vinna! A sentiment that fits Eurovision like a glove.
Getting into a foreign language TV show opens up a web of connected socials, too, and Drag Race Sweden has provided some very entertaining accounts. In particular, if you’re interested in the accents of Skåne – the Swedish region where Malmö is situated – then competing queen Elecktra’s TikTok is worth a follow. There’s even another Eurovision link-up there, as she was one of the contestants at this year’s Melodifestivalen. And of course it was in Skåne dialect, which she had form for after performing the hilarious Unna daj (Treat Yourself) in her season. Banna maj was every bit as wonderfully camp. #ElecktraWasRobbed, indeed.
By the way, for learners of Swedish and other languages, Wow Presents, which hosts most of the worldwide Drag Race content, is well worth the £4-ish a month it costs to subscribe. Fabulous, binge-worthy fun that’ll have you laughing and learning.
Courses and Traditional Content
Of course, I also invested my time and dosh in a couple of courses at the beginning of this journey. How could I not, being the book fiend that I am. As a Norwegian speaker, though, not many courses are geared up to the false – or rather, transferring – beginners, and I found it a slog to get past those early chapters where it seemed as though I was treading the same ground all over again. My Swedish side-step, piggybacking on media content created for the Swedish market was, by comparison, much more dynamic, interest-holding and effective as a strategy.
That’s not to say that some traditional course books haven’t been useful. Teach Yourself Swedish Tutor, for example, is a great dip-in-and-out book with short, snappy chapters, each with a tight grammar focus. Alongside that, old stalwart Duolingo has been predictably very handy for new vocab (and giving it the Swedish treatment has also fostered a much healthier use of the app).
So, armed with my newfound Swedish, off to Malmö I go. Through the fun stuff I used along the way to learning Swedish, I feel I know Sweden itself a lot better, too. And on top of that, it’s been an ace low-stakes, low-pressure, high-entertainment-value way to learn. As such, it’s been one of the most enjoyable, guilt-free dabblings that I’ve had with a foreign language.
I’ve been crash-learning Swedish (well, side-stepping into it from Norwegian) more and more intensively of late. And one of the most pleasant linguistic detours I’ve made has been through the lush valleys of Swedish proverbs.
Proverbs and sayings have always been a favourite way in of mine when working on a language, and for several good reasons. Firstly, they’re short, and usually easier to remember by design so people could easily memorise and recite them. Secondly, they’re very often built around high-frequency structures (think X is like Y, better X than Y) that serve as effective language models.
Bättre en fågel i handen än tio i skogen (Better one bird in the hand than ten in the forest)
But there’s another big pay-off to learning through proverbs that is more than the sum of their words. They pack a lot of meaning into a short space – drop them in and you’re calling to the conversation all the nuance they carry. Think of the grass is always greener… You don’t even need to mention the second, missing part of that English proverb, and it already calls to mind countless shared parables of misplaced dissatisfaction. And since they’re based on those parables and folk histories that ‘grew up’ alongside your target language, proverbs can grant us some fascinating cultural insights, too.
In short, master proverbs and you’ll sound like you really know what you’re talking about in the target language.
Finding Proverbs
For many target languages, you’ll likely be able to source some kind of proverbs compendium in a good bookshop, as they’re as much of interest to native speakers as they are to learners. When you do find a good one, compilations of sayings are the epitome of the dip-in-and-out book. I’ve picked up lots of Gaelic constructions and vocab leafing idly through Alexander Nicolson’s Gaelic Proverbs in my spare moments. It was definitely time for me to try the same with some Swedish.
Without a good Swedish bookshop to hand, though, I turned to the Internet in the meantime. A good place to start is to find out what “[your language] proverbs” is in your target language (it’s svenska ordspråk in Swedish), and see what a good search engine throws up.
Tala är silver, tiga är guld (Talking is silver, silence is gold)
Local cultural institutions in particular can be rich sources of articles on folk wisdom like proverbs. There are some lovely sites and articles that introduce the wise words of svenska in digestible chunks. My handful of Swedish favourites below are each written for a native speaker audience. They all give potted backgrounds on the proverbs in Swedish, making for some great extra reading practice.
This folk-minded article is a wonderful introduction to Swedish proverbs, offering not only examples, but also exploring the characteristics of proverbs and what makes them ‘stick’. There’s a special section on sayings from the Gothenburg area too, which adds a nice local flavour.
This article from the Land publication offers 19 common Swedish proverbs in handy list format. Even more handily, it paraphrases each in order to explain their meaning. Great for working out what some of the more archaic words mean without reaching for the Swedish-English dictionary!
Nordiska Museet offers another well-curated list, with not only paraphrasing, but etymological information on the more difficult or outdated words.
The Proverbial AI
You can also tap the vast training banks of AI platforms for proverbial nuggets. Granted, the knowledge of LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude may not be complete – training data is only a subset of material available online – but AI does offer the advantage of activity creation with the material.
Try this prompt for starters:
Create a Swedish proverbs activity to help me practise my Swedish.
Choose five well-known proverbs, and replace a key word in each with a gap. I must choose the correct word for the gap from four alternatives in each case. Make some of the alternatives humorous! Add an answer key at the end of this quiz along with brief explanations of each proverb.
I managed to get some really fun quizzes out of this. Well worth playing around with for self-learning mini-worksheets!
A Swedish proverbs activity created by ChatGPT-4
AI platforms can also play a role as ‘proverb visualisers’, which is how I generated the images in this article. Proverbs can often employ some quite unusual imagery; letting picture generators loose on those can be a fantastic way to make them more memorable!
However you come across target language sayings and proverbs, you can learn a lot from these little chunks of wisdom. Do you have a favourite saying in any of the languages you’re studying? Let us know in the comments!
I always think Scandinavian languages are like football teams. You pick one and you stick with it.
It was Norwegian that I plucked out of the polyglot hat very early on. Admittedly, as with many of those early language choices, it was my Eurovision favourites that led the way. I positively lapped up Norway’s entries in the 90s, so resolved to learn as much as I possibly could about the country and language (or languages, as I soon found out).
Scandinavian Value for Money
The thing is, with a Scandi lang, you get bang for your buck. First-language speakers of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish grow up with this in mind. They readily understand each other’s languages – to varying degrees – and consume media from each other’s countries with few issues.
As a second-language speaker, you too can gain access to that value for money party to some extent. Learning Norwegian equips you with an ability to read Danish and Swedish with little difficulty, and, I soon found, to follow the gist to the most animated of Melodifestivalen presenters. You can even fake speaking one of the other languages semi-successfully by adjusting your accent and tone. It’s like supporting your team, but nipping over to see a rival team’s games now and again.
Ohhhh, no. I soon realised that it’s a slippery slope to assume any of the Scandilangs line up with each other perfectly. As I delve into formal Swedish study for the first time, I’m learning how unintentionally hilarious that assumption could be. For instance, the Norwegian word ful can mean clever or sly. Don’t go calling anyone in Sweden that, though. There, it means ugly.
Other mismatches are perhaps less likely to get you into actual trouble, but will still give you away as a blagger, not a speaker. You’ll need to remember that a newspaper is a tidning, not an avis, for example. You don’t like (like) and huske (remember) but rather tycka om and komma ihåg, using phrasal constructions that Swedish seems so much more partial to than Norwegian. And before you cry wolf, be aware that it’s a varg, not an ulv (incidentally, Swedish ditched the latter due to superstition, a fascinating phenomenon known as taboo replacement).
In any case, having a real go at Swedish is opening my eyes to how different the languages are from each other, and challenging the flawed assumption of equivalency. Maybe soon, I’ll be singing along to those Melfest favourites in the original language, and not my best faux Swewegian.
I’m still Team Norway – but might have sneakily bought a Sweden scarf to whip out at the right moment now and again too.
The stars aligned for me this week. Not one, but two 1990s copies of Teach Yourself Swedish arrived in my postbox. Used, super cheap, but both so pristine you’d think they’d never been removed from their original bookshop shelves. Winning the eBay language learning lottery!
Why two copies of Teach Yourself Swedish, you ask? Isn’t that just being greedy?
Well first, is there really such a thing as greed when it comes to books? Our love knows no bounds. (Note: it probably is possible to have too many books, but I’m not there yet.)
Secondly, they’re actually different books.
A Long Time Ago in a Language Learning Galaxy Far Away…
You see, Teach Yourself has been going for donkey’s years, and by the 80s and 90s, the company had accrued a whole back catalogue of vintage language learning titles. As I’ve said many a time before, older language learning material shouldn’t be written off – it’s solid, albeit usually more grammar-based learning, and often very inexpensive.
But clearly, things needed a refresh. So Teach Yourself set about recommissioning a lot of those old tomes with completely updated replacements. It started in the late 80s, with updated French, German, Italian and Spanish titles. At first, these appeared in the 80s blue style covers.
But, come the 90s, Teach Yourself went arty in glorious technicolour. The book covers positively exploded in shapes and colours. Many are things of beauty (at least to my geeky eye), and it’s one of the reasons I love collecting them.
The Double Life of TY Books
However, those books had a double life during the transition. Older courses saw reissues, but with the bright, shiny covers. One last hoorah before they were retired.
But then, their successors (or usurpers?) came along, in their shiny, new covers – sometimes the same ones as the old course!Teach Yourself Gaelic, for example, recycles the same wrap even as it transitions from the old Roderick MacKinnon course to the updated Boyd Robertson edition. You can only tell the newer edition from a big yellow New! box in the corner. (No, that text was never going to age well.)
This clearly isn’t the case with Teach Yourself Swedish. Both the R.J.McClean and Vera Croghan books have their own wonderful designs. But for all intents and purposes, they were both still new language books in the 90s.
It’s just one has a much older soul. And I love it all the more for it.
A pristine copy of Teach Yourself Swedish by R.J.McClean (1992)
The eBay Bookseller Lottery
With the wonderful quality of these two titles from that crossover period of the early 90s, I clearly lucked out on the eBay wheel of fortune. Items from the eBay book giants are generally in great condition; some just require a bit more TLC than this pair.
Of course, you can’t tell the condition of books from eBay supersellers until they arrive. That’s part of the fun, of course. But it does lead to the occasional sigh of deflation, as one described as very good lands on your doormat in a rather more dishevelled state. That doesn’t happen too often, thankfully.
Language never stands still. As learners, we study a moving target. The only constant is change.
It’s something that hits you when you learn from old textbooks. Many old, forgotten language courses still have mileage in them, especially if you like learning the nuts and bolts of grammar early on. You do have to keep one eye on the relevancy of the language learnt, though.
For instance, I’ve learnt a lot over the last couple of months from a Teach Yourself Polish edition that was originally published in 1948. It’s no longer available in print, but it really suits my learning style; I’ve not found a gentler, clearer introduction to Polish grammar in anything newer.
Language reflects social change
Saying that, the world, and the vocabulary that reflects it, have changed a lot since 1948. I won’t find the Polish for computer or mobile phone in there, for example. Neither will I be able to talk about my job (developing language learning software). I can’t even talk about recent political events (what’s the Polish for Brexit or fake news?).
These sweeping and rapid changes tend to affect the contentwords of a language. Generally speaking, the function words – those nuts and bolts like articles, conjunctions and pronouns – are slower to change. It has taken centuries, for example, for English to whittle down the pronouns ‘thou’ and ‘ye’ to a single ‘you’.
It’s worth noting that there is nothing truly new about gender neutrality in language. Languages like Finnish and Turkish have long lacked a marker for gender in the equivalent of he/she. The difference is that their systems, presumably, evolved over millennia of language change; Swedish and Norwegian hen have emerged in just a few years, testimony to this new world of rapid change.
Stay ahead of change
So how can the language learner cope in this world? Well, sweeping functional changes are still rare in language, despite the hen example. Changes in usage and convention can happen from generation to generation, like shifts in the Swedish use of ‘you’. Still, these changes won’t make you unintelligible (and nothing a few days in the country won’t cure!).
Otherwise, there are a few tactics you can keep in mind to protect your language skills from becoming outdated.
Be on the lookout
It is important to arm yourself with cultural awareness when using slightly older materials. With old texts, bear in mind that the political world may have shifted; my 1948 Polish course, for example, is littered with military terms, doubtlessly useful to friends and relatives of Polish service personnel settled in the UK post-war. Less useful to me, I’m aware of the vocab I can probably ignore for now.
The names of countries may even have changed; pre-1989 German materials are historical documents in themselves, attesting to a still divided country. The terms for languages themselves may be different; texts on Serbo-Croat for learning the language of Yugoslavia have been swept away in favour of separate texts on the Serbian and Croatian of now independent countries.
Actively build vocabulary
Be aware of how the world has changed; actively seek to plug gaps your learning resources. Google Translate is being updated constantly, so great for finding single terms on modern life. Use tech / computer / lifestyle magazines in the target language to mine for new terms (Readly is a useful subscription service featuring many foreign titles).
Keeping ahead of change with Google Translate
Read all about it
Read current affairs in your target language as widely as possible. Online news is (generally) a cost-free way of doing this. Here is a nice list of foreign language outlets to start with. Expose yourself constantly to the topics of the day, and note any new terms for learning. I use Evernote and Anki for adding terms to my vocab bank.
Finally, don’t see language change as a hindrance. Rather, be intrigued by it, and strive to follow developments in your target language country. Learning how a language has changed / is changing can increase your familiarity with both the language and the society it belongs to.
It illustrates perfectly how language should never be studied in isolation on a textbook page, but ‘in the wild’ as a living, breathing creature.
Thanks again to the brilliant NRK radio programme Språkteigen, who recently ran the story of ‘hen’ in Norway, and provided the inspiration for this post!
