Paddysprat wrote:Don't suppose swedish is easy to learn is it?
Actually, and while not wishing to bore anyone with the rudimentaries of comparative linguistics, Swedish is one, if not the, easiest European language for an English speaker to learn.
Why? Well, because unlike Spanish, French, Italian and Russian, Swedish has a similar grammatical system to English.
This means that unlike those languages Swedish, like English, doesn't have a different ending for each noun - depending on person. And it doesn't have a different ending for each person for each verb tense.
So in English:
I can
You can
He/she/it can
We can
You can
They can
The same verb in Swedish:
Jag kan
Du kan
Han/hon/det kan
Vi kan
Ni kan
De kan
Whereas French, Russian, Spanish etc have different endings for each of those.
As regards nouns
English:
My book
Your book
His Book
and so on
Swedish:
Min bok
Din bok
Hans bok
and so on.
Again the other languages often have a different form for the noun for each person.
The other great advantage with Swedish over both English and French and Danish, is that once you've learned the alphabet, what you see on the page is what you say 99% of the time i.e. words are pronounced as they're spelled. So there's none of this cough (koff) versus bough (bow) business.
Also, Swedish like English doesn't have 3 cases as in German and Russian or even two as in French, Spanish. It has one, (common) except for a handful of persistent (neuter) nouns. So none of that masculine, feminine, neutral nonsense.
Swedish is a dream to learn if you struggled thorugh school with French or German, as yet another similarity shows, in that word order is very close to that of English, at least when compared to French and German
Jag kan rida en cykel =
I can ride a bicycle
Mitt hus är brun =
My house is brown
Mina barn är sex och elva =
My children (compare with Scottish bairn) are six and eleven
And of course, as you'll now notice a great deal of the vocabulary is either the same or very similar- both languages of course being Germanic, nicht var mein freund?
Though, to be honest, it did help (leanring Swedish) that I'd studied French for 6 years, Irish for 2 years, and Latin in school and church as well.
But at the end of the day it isn't all about linguistic aptitiude, it's about willpower. I NEEDED and WANTED to be fluent before I moved so I made sure I was.
That said, I have quite a few British friends in my town who've lived here some of them for over 15 years, who don't speak Swedish at all & aren't bothered about learning it, simply because most Swedes are more than happy to speak English with you, and they're very good at it.
Here endeth ye comparison.