I reached a certain level of my Duolingo Swedish course and the system asked me if I wanted to share an announcement on Facebook about my achievement. I did.
The Duloingo system put up a picture not saying the language but listing words I had learned.
This forced me to check whether I could still remember them. I could, six out of eight, and in context I can turn them into English. But the word endings were a puzzle. Was it book or books? To laugh, I laugh? I went into translate Google to check the Swedish English and turn the results back English to Swedish and again reversing. Here are the results.
Swedish - English
1 flicka - girl
2 morgon = morning, like the German, morgen
3 bocker looks like bok which is book - is bocker books?
Yes. Add two dots over the o and add two letters of the alphabet and you have the plural, books.
4 Kommer looks like come and sounds like come. It translates as comes.
5 fragar with a circle above the first a, ask?
fraga is ask. fragar (with a circle above the first a) is questions
6 skrattar - laughing
7 hastar with two dots over the first a is horses
Simple Wiki explains the pronunciation
There are three characters in the Swedish language that are not used in English. These are å, ä and ö. The letter å is a vowel sound between [a] and [o], similar to the English word awe. The letter ä is a vowel sound similar to [ɛ], like in the English word bed. The letter ö is a vowel sound between [o] and [ɛ], pronounced [øː] like the u in the English word burn. These characters are also used in the Finnish language, while Norwegian and Danish languages replace ä and ö with similar characters æ and ø.
Swedish also has some important differences in grammar. Definite articles are suffixed onto the end of their nouns, so ett hus (a house) becomes huset (the house). Also unlike English, Swedish uses two grammatical genders called Common and Neuter. Nouns of the Common gender are sometimes called "en words", and many words for living (or once-living) things are "en words". Nouns of the Neuter gender are sometimes called "ett words".
| Swedish | English |
|---|---|
| Ett/En | One |
| Två | Two |
| Tre | Three |
| Fyra | Four |
| Fem | Five |
| Sex | Six |
| Sju | Seven |
| Åtta | Eight |
| Nio | Nine |
| Tio | Ten |
| Ja | Yes |
| Nej | No |
| Jag | I |
| Du | You |
| Mig | Me |
| Han | He |
| Hon | She |
| Vi | We |
| De/dem | They/them |
| Jag är | I am |
| Sverige | Sweden |
| Hus | House |
| Hem | Home |
| Väg | Way |
| Björnar | Bears |
| Hjälp | Help |
Basic Swedish Expressions
| God dag/Hej | Good day/Hello |
| Hur mår du? | How are you? |
| Jag mår bra, tack | Very good, thank you |
| Tack | Thank you |
| Tack så mycket | Thank you very much |
| God morgon | Good morning |
| God eftermiddag | Good evening |
| Hej då | Goodbye |
Useful websites
Swedish and other languages to learn
Swedish language in Wikipedia
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