Swedish keeps a separate word for singular you (du) and plural you (ni), a distinction English used to make with thou and ye. This lesson covers those pronouns alongside basic -ar and -er verb endings so you can start building simple sentences with any subject.
Vocabulary in this lesson
Transcript
The full transcript of this free lesson. Swedish lines have their English translation underneath.
Now we need to learn how to say you. To say you, as in one person, you're speaking to one person, you would say du, du. So how would you say you present?
Du presenterar.
But to say you as in a lot of people, you actually have a different word for that. So this may seem a bit off for English speakers because you use you for both one person, singular, like you, can you help me, one person, or can you guys help me out. But in Swedish, you actually use two different words.
And historically, in the English language, you actually did have two different words. So you can see in old Shakespearean English, you can find things like thee and thy and stuff like this. But of course, in modern English, you won't find this. In Swedish, however, you have a different word, and that word is ni, ni. So how would you say you inform using ni?
Ni informerar. How do you say you document? Once again, plural, a lot of people.
Ni dokumenterar.
To say they, talk about a group of people, to say they, you would say de, de. However, it's spelled d-e, but it's pronounced de. So they present, how would you say that?
De presenterar. Very good. They inform?
De informerar. What about 'it documents'? And to say 'it' in Swedish, it's actually a bit more complicated than English, because you have two different words to say 'it'. So you have den or det.
den or det. And we can talk about the differences between these two in more detail later on, but for now, remember that there are two different variants here. You have den dokumenterar or det dokumenterar. So in this particular sentence, den would make a bit more sense, but we're going to talk about that later on.
So to say 'we' is the easiest of all of the ones that we have learned so far, because it's very similar to English. So to say 'we', you would say vi. vi. So how would you say 'we present'?
Vi presenterar. So, if we look at the verbs, and verbs are of course words that have to do with something that you do, so 'he runs', 'she plays'. In Swedish you have verbs that commonly end with er and those that end with ar. er, ar.
So of course they don't cover all verbs unfortunately, but a lot of verbs tend to fall into one of these two categories. So for the ar verbs, you have for instance 'to speak', which is att tala. att tala.
You can also say prata.
So, how would you say I speak? Well, to say I speak, you do exactly what we did before. So what did we do before? Well, we added on a r, right? So we said presenterar would be I present.
Jag presenterar. So in this case we do the exact same thing, we add on the r. Because this is an -ar verb, it ends with -ar. So, jag talar, I speak. However, for other verbs, they tend to end with -er when they have been changed. So for instance, to read in Swedish is att läsa.
So this means to read, the dictionary form. To use this actively in a sentence, like saying he reads, you would say han läser.
And this is an e r verb, han läser. You don't say han läsar, you say han läser. How would you say she reads?
Hon läser, good. And it's the same for all of the different forms, I, we, he, she, and so forth.
So how would you say I read? And remember the word for I is jag.
Jag läser, or jag läser. Pronouncing it without the g.