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Are there any good Swedish courses? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| COF Senior Member United States Joined 5612 days ago 262 posts - 354 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 7 23 March 2010 at 9:44pm | IP Logged |
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Everyone says that Swedish has the most learning material available of all the Scandinavian languages, but if anything I'd say for English speakers the material available is poor and probably significantly worse than all the other languages. I have found better material for both Norwegian, Finnish and Danish than I have Swedish.
TY Swedish and Colloquial Swedish are crap compared to TY/Colloquial Norwegian and Danish. I am yet to find any good courses. There are such a lack of good courses that I've even considered using TY Norwegian as a way of ulimately learning Swedish. Has anyone got any suggestions? Thanks Edited by COF on 23 March 2010 at 9:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6937 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 2 of 7 23 March 2010 at 9:50pm | IP Logged |
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Have you looked at FSI Swedish?
www.fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php?page=Swedish I've heard and read that Gladys Hird's book "Swedish: An Elementary Grammar-Reader" is quite good, if a bit old-fashioned. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5234 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 3 of 7 23 March 2010 at 9:59pm | IP Logged |
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Have you looked at the Scandinavian language resource thread?
http://how-to-learn- any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=19352&PN=1 Edited by tractor on 23 March 2010 at 10:01pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5767 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 4 of 7 24 March 2010 at 8:12am | IP Logged |
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I started Swedish from scratch, and so far I've used the following four resources:
1) Olle Kjellin's explanation of Swedish prosody 2) the book "Swedish: an essential grammar" (2008, by Philip Holmes and Ian Hinchliffe), which I skimmed through and took many example sentences to put into my flashcard program. There's some good info about pronunciation and other things in there, not just grammar tables as I expected. It actually has quite a few good example sentences. It was a great introduction to many aspects of Swedish. 3) a 2000 word vocab list, with example sentence(s) for each word (this is all in Swedish, but the examples are mostly simple and can be easily cut and pasted into google translate when they're not clear....a great source of material) 4) Assimil's "Swedisch ohne Mühe". Yes, it's in German, but it has tons of great example sentences and starts off very simply. It introduces vocab in a nice order. Perhaps I'm more comfortable with this book because I can read the German explanations fairly easily already, so I don't know how useful it would be if you can't read German. I briefly looked at "Colloquial Swedish", but I found it to be too many boring explanations and tables, and too few example sentences. I actually haven't even made it half-way through the Assimil book either, but it was good to have around because of the tons of awesome example sentences. Another thing I did right from the beginning was get a Swedish copy of The Hobbit (because I know the story very well). I started by working sentence-by-sentence to translate a whole page using google translate, and then if I was interested in any of those words then I'd throw the sentence into my Anki flashcard deck. I found this much more interesting as a sort of puzzle to figure out, rather than reading some lame dialog about buying fruit or bus tickets. A side effect of this is that I know how to say elf, dwarf, wizard, sword, spear, ring, and eagle, but I have very little vocab about common fruits or any of those other topics that are common in "Colloquial Swedish". But I don't really care about that at this point, because my knowledge of all sorts of other really common Swedish words is quite good because I'm reading an actual book. The above-listed resources have gotten me to a point where I can listen to my Harry Potter audiobook while I read (both audio and text in Swedish), and I also listen/read The Hobbit with accompanying audiobook. I don't really understand a lot yet, since they're both technically way above my level still, but I get the general plot and my vocabulary is rapidly increasing. I'm having fun, and progressing quickly. I spent less than 10 hours using the intro books, maybe about the same amount of time on Assimil, and much more time hacking through sentences on my own in The Hobbit and Harry Potter, adding sentences to Anki, and reviewing the sentences I already had in Anki. I don't really feel like there was a huge "lack" because of the small number of English-language Swedish instructional books. I just structured my time more around using native Swedish materials instead. I've also done over 100 hours of listening to native Swedish materials (mainly audiobooks), which I found very helpful. The one thing I really wish I had, but I haven't found yet, is some sort of TV series that I can buy on DVD and watch a lot. For German I made great progress by watching the entire 7 seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 (dubbed in German, occasionally using German subtitles to help me out, but no English). svtplay.se has some Swedish TV to watch on the web, but I haven't yet found anything there that I could get excited about, so I haven't used it that much. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5792 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 5 of 7 24 March 2010 at 11:51am | IP Logged |
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BBC4 had the detective series Wallander on for a while. It's a quality production with good storylines and good acting.
Each episode is feature length, so you'll be sure to get a lot of recurring vocabulary. However, I wasn't attempting to learn the language from it and just stuck with the English subtitles for the most part. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5234 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 7 of 7 24 March 2010 at 1:16pm | IP Logged |
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There are two Wallander series; one Swedish and one British.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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