||Introduction to Swedish© by Urban Sikeborg, Stockholm (1997-98)|
How to introduce yourself
|Home | Chap. 2 | Chap. 3 | Chap. 4 | Chap. 5 | Chap. 6 | Chap. 7 | Chap. 8 | Chap. 9 ||
|On this page|| Introduction
Comments om the examples
Sentences to study
explanations to the sentences:
foreigners have claimed that Swedes in general are rather
reserved and stiff in comparison to their own fellow
countrymen. This alleged cultural feature is not a
personal quality, however. You will soon find out that
the Swedes are as passionate, wonderful or silly as most
other people you know.
The exercise below will help you to briefly introduce yourself in Swedish; in turn you will be introduced to some of the most basic elements of Swedish grammar.
|To facilitate the learning
the Swedish words in this and the following chapters have
been marked with accent signs, to show which syllable
should be more stressed than the others. Since it is
necessary to carefully distinguish between short and long
vowel in spoken Swedish, long vowels have been underlined
in the examples. Furthermore, letters that usually are
not sounded in spoken Swedish have been
crossed-out; 'och' ('and'), for instance, is in
this course shown as 'o
Each word is given with its literal counterpart in English. The purpose of this is to help you to immediately understand the sentences presented and also to demonstrate how the word order in Swedish differs from English.
| Hej! Ja
Hello! I am called and come from What are called you?
Från is usually changed to ifrå´n (literally in-from) when it appears after the word it is referring to or at the end of a clause or a sentence.
(I) and du (you) are pronouns, words denoting
persons that perform an action: 'I run', 'You saw'. In
English you can refer either to one
individual or to several persons; in Swedish you use
separate forms, depending on the number of people you are
addressing. These so-called personal pronouns also exist
in a different form, the objective.
The objective form is used whenever someone or something is the object of an action. In the sentence 'You saw me', 'you' is the basic form of the pronoun, whereas 'me' is the objective form of 'I'. Swedish is in this respect very similar to English.
| Swedes usually
address each other with the pronoun du,
regardless of what position they might have or if they
meet for the first time; in fact, the formal
Ni is nowadays considered old-fashioned and
is mainly used when talking to older people. The English
habit of frequently inserting the name of the person you
are talking to is not common in Swedish and can sometimes
be felt to be too intimate.
The o in hon is pronounced like oo in good.
There are two words for it in
Swedish. This is because Swedish, unlike English, still
defines living beings and things in terms of gender, and
is in this respect similar to the German with its
der, die, das and the French le,
la. Whether one should use den or
det is decided by what gender the word it
refers to has. In the general and neutral meaning of
it in phrases like it is cold
today, det is used: De
The word for they is normally spelled de, but is pronounced dom.
The objective forms 'mig' and 'dig' are nowadays always pronounced 'mej' and 'dej' (very similar to English 'may' and 'day').
studerar, jobbar and
arbetar are verbs, words that show what
someone/something is or does or what is happening.
While English has two different endings for regular verbs depending on who is performing the action - I read, you read, but he/she/it reads - Swedish very conveniently uses only one form, regardless of person: 'Jag kommer', 'du kommer', 'hon kommer', 'vi kommer' etc.
Most regular verbs use the ending -er, -ar or -r when they are in the present tense, i.e. describe an action taking place now: hon studérar = she studies/is studying. Read more about the Swedish verbs in Chapter 7.
Stockholm School of Economics, Box 6501, SE-113 83 Stockholm
Phone +46-8-736 90 00, Fax +46-8-31 81 86
This page was updated on 21 December 1998.