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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| DanAgger Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5791 days ago 20 posts - 21 votes Studies: English* | Message 1 of 17 30 December 2009 at 4:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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I am at the early stage of Swedish, trying to understand and pick up as much of the pronunciation and stress as I can, such as individual letters, pairs of letters and the
effect this has on the way words sound. Does anyone know an online resource where you can type in words and then hear the pronunciation of that word? Sort of like an audible dictionary I suppose! Or indeed any other resource that could help with this, many thanks. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachjunge Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 7164 days ago 368 posts - 548 votes  Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Spanish, Russian | Message 2 of 17 31 December 2009 at 5:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Try the site Forvo.
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| modus.irrealis Bilingual Triglot Newbie Canada Joined 5877 days ago 29 posts - 37 votes Speaks: English*, Greek*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Danish, Turkish | Message 3 of 17 01 January 2010 at 3:36am | IP Logged | ||
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There's also the lexin dictionary at http://lexin.nada.kth.se/sve-sve.html. Unfortunately it seems the audio button shows up only if you use the Swedish-Swedish dictionary and not the Swedish-English one.
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| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5985 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 4 of 17 01 January 2010 at 8:54am | IP Logged | ||
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here's a paper called A new and simpler terminology for Swedish prosody. I found it extremely helpful for prosody stuff so far. I still haven't figured out which words to stress, but if at least I have an idea of how to do it if I need to.
Also, pay attention to rs / rn / rt / rd (and maybe others?). They tend to have no R sound, but are a retroflex or alveolar version of the second consonant. To my ears, these sound like Punjabi or Hindi versions of the letters. Not many of the pronunciation guides explain these correctly, but if you know that the tongue goes back further in the mouth for these, and then you listen a lot, it'll probably make more sense. The other group that you need to pay attention to are the consonants that change in front of "soft vowels". You'll have to listen to get the proper pronunciation of k, g, sk/sj/etc, when they are in front of e, i, ö, ä, y. And the last category I can think of off the top of my head is the magical disappearing sounds in certain words. Some words lose their -de ending, and a lot of -g endings seem to disappear or change, and of course är sounds like ä. This category of words seems to contain a lot of really common words though, so again, you'll catch on just by listening a lot and then it'll just seem normal. Disclaimer: All of the above advice should be scrutinized carefully, because I'm a total beginner. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5520 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 5 of 17 01 January 2010 at 2:57pm | IP Logged | ||
This is good advice, but you should probably approach Swedish spelling more like English spelling. Instead of trying to work out letter to sound correspondances and lots of exceptions and rules for sound changes, learn to speak and learn to write, match the sound of WORDS to the spelling of WORDS. In actual Swedish speech what you hear is often pretty far from what you see: "är det där din bok?" will be pronounced as "e're dä Din bok?" where D is the rd sound mentioned above. Note that e're is dialectal, as is the rd > D (but it is present in the prestige dialect, so you may want to learn it). 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| DanAgger Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5791 days ago 20 posts - 21 votes Studies: English* | Message 6 of 17 01 January 2010 at 3:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for all the tips guys, i'll try and focus on some general rules and stuff to
begin with. I guess the best way is to just listen to the words and focus on how it's pronounced and you'll start to notice the rules and stuff. I've listened to a few sentences so far like the "är det där din bok?" and to begin with I couldn't see how they said what was written on the page! But then you learn the silent letters and that one word seems to roll into the next and it begins to make more sense the more you listen to it! Just out of curiosity Doviende, what main resources are you using to learn? I couldn't find too much on-line and am just using 'Colloquial Swedish, The Complete Course For Beginners'. I also have a few grammar books and a verb book. I'm going quite slowly at the moment though as i like to know what every word in a sentence means, like 'Nej, det är de inte'. The translation for this sentence was 'No, they're not'. But I like to know how it's structured and it seems to be 'No, that are they not'. Maybe this seems pointless but it seems useful to me to know how the sentence forms and where words appear. I was hoping there would be an Assimil for English/Swedish but unfortunately there is not! Edited by DanAgger on 01 January 2010 at 3:40pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5985 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 7 of 17 01 January 2010 at 4:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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At the start, I bootstrapped myself by doing Pimsleur (which was super simple, only 10 lessons), and by reading a bit of a Teach Yourself book. Every once in a while I briefly consult a variety of books and websites, such as a grammar book or a wordlist of common words with example sentences.
My main source of content though, is going through "The Hobbit" in Swedish ("Hobbiten", purchased from bokus.com) and translating with google translate, or by consulting the German version ("Der kleine Hobbit") as a parallel text. I also have an audiobook version of Hobbiten, although I also occasionally listen to some Swedish radio online, which helped me get used to the sounds before my audiobook arrived. In the future, I'm thinking of trying the German/Swedish Assimil ("Schwedisch ohne Mühe"), or maybe some other books that I'm really familiar with, like one or more of the Harry Potter books (because they have an audiobook version available too). Then I'd move on to some regular native-Swedish books that have audio versions. You can check my "Doviende's Swedish Log" for more details. There are a bunch of other useful links around, if you search the forums. There was a simplified Swedish newspaper online, and a site with all sorts of Swedish tv. I don't have the links handy right now. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| DanAgger Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5791 days ago 20 posts - 21 votes Studies: English* | Message 8 of 17 01 January 2010 at 7:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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It must take a long time to work through The Hobbit and translate text? Thanks a lot
though, I'll check out Google's translations as some of the ones I've used have not been so consistent. I've checked out a few radio stations online so will carry on with that and i was actually thinking about getting some Harry Potter books in the future so it's good to know there are audio versions! Nice blog by the way, I'd never really considered reading a book this early on but it seems to have its benefits. Edited by DanAgger on 01 January 2010 at 7:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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