How DuoLingo helped me survive lockdown!

Well, I think everyone can agree the year 2020 has been a challenging one. Forced to stay inside, uncertainty about the state of the world and the future has made it one we'll be glad to see the back of! However, it's not all been doom and gloom, as many people have used the opportunity to be more creative, pick up new skills aswell as develop old ones.

For me personally, aswell as spending time on various music projects -(I'll write another story about that) :) I've spent the entirety of lockdown doing something I've always wanted to, but never had time for- learning Swedish.

I knew about DuoLingo for a while, my mum uses it for Polish, and my brother and sister have dabbled in it too with Spanish and German. And with being forced to stay in over the summer, it gave me a chance to really spend some serious time knuckling down and getting to grips with what is, I can say after 6 and a months of learning it, a very challenging, but very cool language indeed!

First off anyone reading this who is also thinking off picking it up, or any of the other languages from neighbouring Scandinivian countries (Norwegian, Danish, Finnish to name but a few!) I have the following advice. Learn a bit of French and German first. Even just the basics. The word structures are very similar, there are even plenty of "borrowed" words from each language for example "Herr" for Mr in German and in "ananas" for pineapple French, and will it go a long way to helping you progress.

I got an A in French at GCSE so took to the Swedish basics like a duck to water, and found myself very quickly getting through the lessons and really enjoying learning it. I'm lucky I have a good memory, so the written and spelling side of my Swedish vocabulary are very strong, but I must admit it, the spoken side is still the weakest. I'm sure it's something a lot of non native speakers of Swedish can relate to, particularly English people, as some of the sounds of letters in words are alien to the English language. But it's very fun to learn and try out a new skill! Hard and soft pronounciation, pitch tone and 3 letters at the end of the alphabet make Swedish very unique!

The good news with learning Swedish, although there of course there are some super long words which can be hard to pronounced, once you grasp the basic phrases, and grammatic structure, the more complicated stuff becomes easier to deal with. It helps that similarly to French, words are grouped in a way that are easy to follow, and if you can remember the basic rules, for example mig, dig, sig it transitions easily into mitt, ditt, sitt and so on. Sometimes these rules go out of the window entirely, as in some lessons there are sentences that make you think "how on earth does make sense?!"

But honestly, I've totally overwhelmed myself with how much I've learnt (not to boast, just to give some reassurance to people who want to pick it up but may find it daunting) because from my experience, it's a very good challenge and if I could speak to myself back in April (that would be weird haha) I'd be pleasantly surprised with how much I'd learnt. Starting to send like something out of Bill and Ted now isn't it? :D

Finally, some other tips on how to learn Swedish, firstly don't be afraid to learn Norwegian and Danish along side, In fact, rather than confuse me, I found it helped me. There are of course lots of similarities between each language, Danish and Norwegian more closely resembling each other. In Swedish you use "jag" for i where is in Norwegian and Danish it's "jeg"

A lot of sentences in (but there are many, many words that are different, they are both entirely different languages in their own right) but have an underlying knowledge, much in the same way a person learning Polish would most likely pick it up better with some knowledge of Czech or Russian and so on.

Another piece of advice is don't just stop with DuoLingo. If you're serious about it learning out (and that goes for any language) branch out and watch and listen to people using the language in movies and TV programmes. I have plenty of recommendations for books/ programmes and reference material, all of which I'll list at the end. Of course, there are many more out there, these are just the things I've come across. I found a website that sells Roald Dahl books in Swedish, so ordered George's Marvellous Medicine, one of my favourite books of all time. Perfect because there was familiarity to the story, but also I was able to pick up new words constantly (I'm still reading it) and if there's a sentence I struggle with, I can use my Swedish dictionary to look it up and try and say it back to myself.

I've also ordered a vegetarian (vegetarisk) cookbook to help me learn to make some recipes over Christmas. So if my knowledge of Swedish fails me, the food will be awful! Haha...hopefully not.

Swedishpod101.com delves more into specific areas that DuoLingo doesn't cover (replace the word Swedish for any other language by the way!) and lots of helpful slang terms, more informal phrases for greeting people and other categories. Swedish is a very complex language and its covered very well on this site. I would also recommend the phone apps Tobo (i believe that has lots languages as I told my brother about it and he found a Spanish version) Swedish Sentence Master and SV-EN Ordbok. There are lots of other on Play store i haven't checked out, but plan to in the future. I also read various news and sports stories on 8sidor.se, a very helpful site because it has a function to listen to a Swedish speaker, and you can click the text back and forth into English, which makes it very helpful with picking up new words and phrases.

Thank you reading my article, I hope you found it informative and useful. I am more used to writing silly and funny articles, more of which will follow this one shortly 😁

Lyckas till, Varsågod!

Chris

Recommended books and websites

Berlitz Swedish Phrasebook and Dictionary

LonelyPlanet Scandinavian Phrasebook

Collins Norstedts Swedish Dictionary

Complete Swedish Beginner to Intermediate Course: (Book and audio support) : Anneli Haake

Essential Swedish Grammar : Julian Granberry

Www.rabensjorgen.se

Www.shop4se.com

Www.bokborsen.se

Www.bokus.com

YouTube

TheSwedishLad

Swedishmadeeasy

Svenskaläraren

Peter SFI

Alfons Åberg

The Bridge (Broen)

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6wbqsb

Sidor.se