Svenska (speaking Swedish)

Sunday, May 4, 2003

For the past couple months we have been taking an introductory Swedish class. It's only a couple of hours once a week, so we aren't learning very quickly, but it's something. When we first got here I expected Swedish to be relatively easier to learn -- I've gotten the impression over the years that English is quite a bit more difficult than most European languages. That's probably true, but Swedish isn't exactly simple either.

Swedish has its roots in German. But there was a period of time in Sweden's history where it had a lot of French influence -- in fact, as I understand it, the current king of Sweden is a descendant of French royalty. So the Swedish language also borrowed from French. These days, nearly all Swedes can speak English fluently, and this has also had an impact on Swedish. Many words -- especially technical words -- are just Swedish-ized English words. Swedes joke that they really speak "Swenglish" -- a mix of Swedish and English.

Nonetheless, these similarities don't make the language easy. Swedish uses the same basic alphabet as English, but with a few accented letters in addition to the normal ones: å, ä, and ö. There are also a fair number of words with é (borrowed from French), although it's not considered to be part of the alphabet. Most letters sound similar to the way they do in English, although the vowels are quite a bit different. One thing that makes it difficult is that many of the vowels sound very similar to each other.

In most cases, a particular letter always has the same sound. But there are some special cases: sometimes 'k' is hard (like the 'c' in "cat"), and other times it is soft -- in this case, it is pronounced more like "sh". There are also some combinations, like "sj" and "sk" which are really weird -- for example, the word for seven is spelled sju, and is pronounced something like "whoo" or "whew". Except if you have a Finnish accent, when it is pronounced more like "shoo". "tj" also has a "shoo" sound, as in tjugo (twenty). The vowels have hard and soft variations, but we haven't really figured those out.

In English we use "a" or "an" as the indefinite article before a word, depending on whether or not the word begins with a vowel sound. Similarly, in Swedish they use "en" and "ett", but the rule for when to use which variation is different. Supposedly, the rule is that nouns referring to people are "en" words, and nouns referring to things are "ett" words. But this doesn't hold up very well -- you have things like "en stol" (a chair) or "ett barn" (a child). Fortunately, the other rule is that about 80% of words are "en" words...so we can just guess and be correct most of the time.

One thing that is a bit easier in Swedish than English or other languages is that there are no complicated conjugations. In English we say "I read" or "he reads" (read/reads based on who is doing it). In Spanish or French it is even more complicated. But in Swedish it is always the same -- "Jag läser", "Han läser", "Du läser", etc. Unfortunately, the rules for changing the tense of a verb (e.g. "I am working", "I have been working", "I will work", "I worked") aren't nearly so constant: the teacher originally told us that there were three different groups of verbs which changed in three different ways. Group 1 didn't seem too bad. But then she divided Group 2 into three subgroups -- 2a, 2b, and 2c. Then in addition to Group 3 there is a fourth group of irregular verbs that don't follow any of the rules. And finally, some of the verbs in the first three groups also don't follow the rules. So this is a bit of a challenge.

I won't go over any more Swedish grammar. But one other reason why it has been difficult for us to learn Swedish is that it is rather difficult to use it. If we actually speak Swedish, it is usually rather difficult for the person to understand what we are saying with our American/Canadian accents. They quickly realize that we don't speak Swedish very well, and switch to English so we can both understand each other better. So knowing a bit of Swedish has been helpful for reading, and a bit for understanding what people are saying, but we really don't have much need to be able to speak it, so we don't get much practice.