We explain Sweden
One of the most frequent questions that we come across is: What’s the best way to learn Swedish? A valid question since there are so many options available that sometimes can be overwhelming to know where to start. Even when every one of us has a specific reason to learn the language, there will always […]
In high school I wasn’t very good at English. I struggled with grammar, which I still detest. I didn’t like the idea of memorizing rules that made no sense to me. It didn’t help that our teacher spoke Spanish or Catalan, either. One day they gave us a book to read: “Black Beauty” by […]
I’ve been living in Sweden for a few months now and while I am far from fluent I have heard more than my fair share of Swedish and have begun stumbling through pronouncing a few sentences of my own. While Swedish bears remarkable similarities to English, German and the other Scandinavian languages, it is a […]
On December 13th, all over Sweden, the day of St.Lucia is celebrated. There are costumes, candles, lights, buns, drinks, and singing 🙂 So Who Is St.Lucia? Along with the celebration of midsummer, the celebration of St.Lucia is very popular cultural tradition here in Sweden. The idea behind this mythical character is that she has the […]
Don’t speak a single word of Swedish yet? No problem! Everyone speaks English (but all the signs are in Swedish) ‘Is this a cucumber or a zucchini??’ I wondered, as I tried my best to figure out the Swedish on the label. After standing in front of the produce for an embarrassingly long time, I […]
We have lived in Sweden for 1 year now, and throughout that year I have been on a very steep (but happy) learning curve. I have shared a lot of posts over on my personal blog at Mamma’s School about living here, but today I thought I would share with you the 15 main things I have […]
The other day I received a request for language courses. The email started off with Respected Madame. This made me laugh. At that moment, I had just locked myself in the bathroom to escape my children – and to check my email, and I was trying to shut out the banging on the door. So […]
In the first few weeks that I lived in Stockholm, I started every conversation the same way: with a perplexed look while uttering the phrase I’m sorry, I don’t speak Swedish. From sales clerks to receptionists, I have apologized to pretty much everyone in the city. After my one-millionth apology in a three-week span (a […]
I started learning Swedish six months ago and during this learning experience, I have defined some milestones for me. I will accept myself fluent in Swedish when I check all these milestones! Jaha This one is relatively easy but it is a good first milestone. “Jaha” is fun to say, so when I first learned […]
Swedish, like any other language, is filled with expressions that obviously have some kind of origin and that probably made sense to the first person ever to speak them. Today, however, these are so wide-spread, maybe even altered a bit, so that they sound like plain nonsense to Swedish learners and when asking a Swede […]