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Is Swedish difficult to understand ? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| albysky Triglot Senior Member Italy lang-8.com/1108796Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4175 days ago 287 posts - 393 votes  Speaks: Italian*, English, German | Message 1 of 29 20 December 2013 at 4:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have tried some swedish , and I am under the impression that the way it is pronounced
makes it a difficult language to understand for foreigners . Many consonats are dropped , some words are merged together , there is the peculiar pitch accent and of course it is spoken very fast like every other language . For sure my ears are totally untrained , but when I began German I was not under this impression , and the same applies to my very limited experience with russian . Edited by albysky on 20 December 2013 at 4:30pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Julie Heptaglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6690 days ago 1251 posts - 1733 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French | Message 2 of 29 20 December 2013 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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Obviously, it's a relative thing but I would not consider Swedish as dififcult to understand (and I generally struggle quite a lot with oral comprehension when I am a beginner). It does seem less clear than Standard German, though.
Consonant dropping is fairly predictable, word merging is not a bigger problem than in most languages I have ever tried to learn, and the pitch accent does not make it significantly more difficult to understand (your own speech production is another thing). Of course, that's only my subjective opinion :). 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 3886 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 3 of 29 20 December 2013 at 5:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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I am a native speaker, so I don't have a personal opinion on the matter, but I'll note that studies show time and again that other Scandinavians often find Swedish easy to understand (EDIT: compared to other Scandinavian languages), although in some studies Danes have a very slight preference for Norwegian. Most Swedish dialects have a very clear pronunciation.
I'm not quite sure what you mean with consonants being dropped. I don't find this a particularly common phenomenon, unless you are referring something like to the endings being different on adjectives depending on the gender? I guess that could affect your understanding of the language, but not very significantly. It's much less of a change than the same phenomenon in French, for example, and the words stay almost exactly the same. Maybe I'm unaware of some highly prevalent consonant dropping I'm doing because I'm a native...? Or maybe it's my lack of standard Swedish creeping in...? As for "some" words being merged together, it's not a matter of "some" words merging and having to deal with irrational memorisation. It's mostly a matter of multiple nouns creating a single concept being treated like a single concept. This is unfamiliar to English speakers and speakers of Romance languages, for example, and I'm sure it can be difficult to get right in the beginning, but you're dealing some fairly simple grammar rules, wherein you essentially remove all of the ‘de’ (or equivalents) from your Romance languages and push the rest of the nouns together. Composing these words will be harder than understanding them in speech, since the pronunciation of the individual parts stays them same (many natives divide the words, incorrectly, since that's how they hear them), there might be a "binding letter" to get right. Edited by eyðimörk on 20 December 2013 at 5:34pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| albysky Triglot Senior Member Italy lang-8.com/1108796Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4175 days ago 287 posts - 393 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German | Message 4 of 29 20 December 2013 at 6:03pm | IP Logged | ||
By consonants dropping I mean for instance : o instead of och , and many other cases like this . I was even under the impression that some words are barely pronounced , short words like concenctors or prepositions in periphrastic expressions , but again maybe it is just because of my untrained ears. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4308 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 5 of 29 20 December 2013 at 6:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, Swedish is difficult to understand as long as you haven't had enough exposure. So
are most other languages I presume. What you call 'consonant dropping' is just a discrepancy between written and spoken Swedish, the written Swedish being slightly more conservative. I don't get how this would impact understanding, it's like you wouldn't understand English just because the word is not pronounced like the sequence of letters it is composed of, and this is the case in English far more often than in Swedish. What makes Swedish (and Norwegian) difficult to understand is in my opinion the retroflex consonants (r+d/t/n/s). And to a lesser degree different realization of pitch-accents and sentence melody in different dialects, but as far as I know this isn't very pronounced in Swedish, it's more of a problem for Norwegian. Try to understand Danish and then come back to Swedish...it will feel much easier in comparison. (not a serious suggestion!) 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6696 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 29 20 December 2013 at 6:55pm | IP Logged | ||
Have a look at http://swedia.ling.gu.se/ and listen to how the general prosody and multi-syllable words are manifested in dialects from North to South... Swedish is no less melodic than Norwegian, and just as melodic as Mandarin (I can assign tones if you want, but I'm sure Ari would diasgree;)). 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| albysky Triglot Senior Member Italy lang-8.com/1108796Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4175 days ago 287 posts - 393 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German | Message 7 of 29 20 December 2013 at 7:04pm | IP Logged | ||
Since I notice you have some experience with scandinavian languages ,I would like to ask you this : is it a problem from abroad to find advanced resources like audiobooks designed for native speakers ? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 3886 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 8 of 29 20 December 2013 at 9:57pm | IP Logged | ||
Ah, yes. When speaking informally people often drop the consonants of a handful of very specific high frequency words: och det är (the Ä is actually transformed into an E) nej (the E is transformed into an Ä) In this respect Swedish isn't very different from other European languages. English is much worse, in fact. Of course in certain dialects certain letters may be harder for the unaccustomed to pick up on, especially in informal speech. If you're not used to the guttural R of south Swedish dialects you may for example think a rather sloppily pronounced "eller" didn't really contain an R at first, but if you listen carefully you'll hear it as a breathy sound. Edited by eyðimörk on 20 December 2013 at 9:59pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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