The Swedish passive voice with -s
What the lesson covers
The lesson provided an overview of formulating sentences in the passive tense in Swedish. It explained that the passive form is used when the person performing an action is unknown, irrelevant, or when the focus is on the action itself rather than the actor. The instruction moved from reviewing active sentences like "I wrote the book" (Jag skrev boken) to demonstrating their passive counterparts, such as "The book was written" (Boken skrevs). Key to forming the passive in Swedish is often adding an '-s' suffix to the verb, which can result in forms like 'skrevs' or 'informerades'. The lesson concluded with examples of passive usage in common contexts, such as newspaper headlines.
Vocabulary in this lesson
35 words. Inside Lingolib each one is tappable in the transcript and saved to your library with one tap.
- all
- every
- allt
- everything
- allting
- everything
- amerikan
- American
- av
- by
- boken
- the book
- bokstäver
- letters
- de
- they
- dem
- them
- det
- it
- dokumenterade
- documented
- dokumenterades
- was documented
- dödades
- were killed
- en
- a/an (common gender)
- gavs
- was given
- han
- he
- hon
- she
- i natt
- tonight
- igår
- yesterday
- informerade
- informed
- informerades
- was informed
- nobelpriset
- the Nobel Prize
- oss
- us
- personer
- people
- rapportera
- report
- rapporterades
- was reported
- sju
- seven
- skrev
- wrote
- skriver
- write
- skrevs
- was written
- små
- small
- till
- to
- ting
- thing
- vem
- whom
- vi
- we
How the lesson starts
The opening of the lesson transcript. The rest is in the course, synced to the video.
We're now going to take a closer look at how you can formulate sentences using a passive tense, so sort of in the passive form. And of course, passive form is a grammatical expression. We don't need to remember those, it's not that important for our purposes. Um, but what is important is to understand what it means.
So what does the passive form mean?
Well, you can have a sentence and you can have it be active, or you can have it be passive. When it's passive, essentially you use it when you don't want to say who did something or when it's not relevant to mention who did something, or for any other purpose where for whatever reason, you want to put the stress on the fact that that thing has been done without putting the emphasis on who did it. So to make this a bit clearer, let's look at some regular sentences.
The video plays beside a transcript that follows it line by line. Swedish words are underlined; tap one and the video pauses, the meaning appears, and the word goes into your library. At the end there is a five-question quiz written from this exact lesson, and every word can be practised out loud.