Complete Swedish Season 2: what to expect

Welcome to the new season of Learning Swedish. This is season two, the much-awaited continuation of the Learning Swedish series. In this season we intend to continue on from the past season and learn much more about how the Swedish language is structured, learn new ways of expressing yourself, but also repeat the stuff we talked about earlier, and then give you a lot of different new examples as well as new learning modules.

So I hope you'll find this to be very exciting and intriguing and that you're gonna learn the Swedish language. So with that being said, we can jump in. So the rules are just the same as before. They haven't changed. What is the secret sauce? What is that thing that allows us to better learn a language?

Number one, you shouldn't force it. It's not something you can force. You don't learn a language in one day or two days. You learn a language by immersing yourself into that language, by essentially inundating yourself into that language and its context and its surroundings.

Of course, the best way to do that is to be in the country where the language that you are studying is readily available. But if you don't have that opportunity, you can still learn by immersing yourself into content, reading news articles or papers or books in that language, listening to audiobooks and many other ways of trying to immerse yourself into the language. But you should not force yourself to memorize.

Instead, it's okay to forget. Actually, it's not only okay to forget, it's part of the process. Because when you learn a new language, it is this continuous process, this iterative process of learning something new, then forgetting that thing, and then learning it again, and forgetting, and learning, and this is how we learn. This is how you learn new words, new concepts.

It's not that you heard it one time and then it's stuck for all eternity. Sometimes it, it might be like that, that you learn a word and then you keep it forever until, until the day you leave this earth. But most times what happens is you learn something and then you're like, oh, that's strange, I never heard that word before. Then you forget about it and then you see it again in a different context and then you connect it back to the old one, and the more you're exposed to that same word, the easier it becomes to learn that word.

And that is the real secret. The real secret is that language is actually not hard. There is no such thing as a, as a difficult word. Sometimes you may look at a word that seems to be complicated even in your native language. Maybe say an, say an academic term or something that, something convoluted that you've never heard before, and somebody will say this is a difficult word.

But it's not a difficult word. In reality, it's no more difficult than the regular words that you use on a daily basis. The only difference is that you're not exposed to that word a lot. And if you were to use that word all the time, then that difficult word would become an easy word. So keep that in mind.

With that being said, how can we then continue on in this new series? In the first lesson, what we're going to look at is number one, we're going to repeat what we've learned from season one. Now, of course, we can't repeat everything from season one, but throughout the course of season two, we intend to bring back as much as possible from the earlier season, yes, so we can make sure that we can remember what we've already learned, and to build on top of those Lego blocks that we built in the past.

Also in this lesson, are gonna learn about different verbs. So if you remember, a verb is a doing word, like running or eating. Um, we try to avoid grammatical terms in this series because when you're learning a new language as a child, you don't really focus on grammar. Instead, you learn that grammar innately, just by listening and trying to figure out and then trying to form your own sentences, failing, listening to the feedback from people, and then improving your own sentence structure.

And that's how we learn. So we're gonna focus on learning in this way. And in this lesson, we also are gonna talk about how to go back into the past. And to go back into the past is of course the past tense, and there's more than one way of doing that, and we're gonna talk a little bit about that. So what we learned in the past season, if you remember, is that the Swedish language is classified as one of the easiest languages to learn for English speakers.

Now, of course, if you're not an English speaker, number one, you wouldn't understand anything that you've heard so far. So I'm pretty sure that if you're still sticking to this, that you at least know enough English to understand this. But if a person does not understand English, for example, and they come from a distant culture compared to Sweden, let's say for example they speak Mandarin, and they don't speak English, they only speak Mandarin, and they want to learn Swedish.

Now for them it would be much more difficult because the sentence structure and the way you structure the language is so different if you compare Swedish and Mandarin Chinese. But for English, it's very similar. It's very similar, which makes it easy for people who actually want to learn Swedish. So what we talked about early on in the past season was this concept of transferring knowledge from things that we know in English and trying to use them in a Swedish context.

So an example we began with was all these words that ended with -ation. So we had for example information, presentation, and documentation, and so forth. You had all of these different words that end with -ation. And we said that these words are often spelled actually the exact same way. Sometimes they may be like one different character, but generally speaking, information in Swedish would just be information.

Okay, so we have information becoming information. Now, if we want to look at the equivalent verb, the doing form of that word, so information is not a doing word, it's not a verb, of course, it's a noun. But if you look at the verb and try to make it into something that's actionable, so to inform, how would you say that in Swedish?

Att informera. Att informera. So this is the dictionary form, the form that you would look up in the dictionary. I want to avoid the grammatical terms as we said before, but you can think of it the form that if you want to look it up in the dictionary, this is what you would look up.

And as I'm saying this, I'm realizing that nobody really uses a dictionary anymore, you just look everything up online. But if you were to look it up in the dictionary, this is the form that you would look up. Att informera, to inform. So we said if we wanted to go from this form, to inform, and instead say he informs or she informs, what would you do?

So how would you say he informs?

Han informerar. So we would put the AR at the end there. Informerar. Att informera, han informerar. And we said it's very simple in Swedish, you don't have to change it when it comes to going from he to they, for example.

In English you would have to do that. So in English you would have to say he informs, but you would say they inform, you would remove the S. But in Swedish it's much easier we said, because it's the same for all of the different pronouns. So you would say han informerar, hon informerar, de informerar, vi informerar, and jag informerar.

If you need to practice those, you can go back to the, to the earlier season. So if we look at the other form here, uh, another example that we gave comes from words that end with -ity. So you have words like university, and we said that when it came to these words, you would just remove the ending and you would replace it with -itet.

So how would you say university in Swedish?

Universitet. Universitet. And as we said before, if you ever need time to think when I'm asking questions, you can just pause. So it's completely fine to just pause the video and to try to answer it yourself, and then you can give up if you can't find the answer and then listen to it.

Electricity.

Elektricitet. Elektricitet. So electricity is elektricitet. And actually, a lot of the times this would be shortened, so you would just say el. In Swedish you can just say el, but the full word is elektricitet.

And then for activity, how would you say that?

Aktivitet. So we can see there's some minor spelling changes. So electricity, it's spelled with a K in Swedish, elektricitet, and activity as well is spelled with a K, so it becomes aktivitet.

He documents the activities. How would you say that?

Han dokumenterar aktiviteterna. So if you forgot aktiviteterna... It's quite easy to get there, so he documents is simply han dokumenterar, right, dokumenterar, presenterar to present. And then activities, we said was aktivitet. So what you get here is aktiviteterna.

The reason it becomes like this is because now we're using the the form, the activities, aktiviteterna. So the -na there is essentially showing that we have a the for this specific word. We're talking about specific activities, so the activities. Aktiviteterna. So it's in plural, aktiviteter, that's plural.

Aktivitet is one, aktiviteterna is the activities.

If you're a bit unsure about this, don't worry, we'll practice some more.

She informs the student. Hon informerar studenten. Hon informerar studenten.

That's pretty straightforward, and once again it becomes studenten. Why? It's one student.

If it had been many students, what do you think the translation would be? So, let's say it would be she informs the students. How would you say that in Swedish?

Hon informerar studenterna. Studenterna. And a lot of the times that r at the end is not really heard in Swedish.

So instead of saying aktiviteterna, you would say aktivitetena. But once again, this is not a big thing, it's just a dialectical thing, and it differs a little bit depending on where you are in Sweden. So I wouldn't put too much focus on learning those nuances. Hon informerar studenten, she informs the student, or hon informerar studenterna would become she informs the students in plural.

How about we organize the activity?

Vi organiserar aktiviteten. Vi organiserar aktiviteten. Once again, you get the -en there to show that it's in definite form, you would call it grammatically. But for our purposes, it's the form that you get when it says the in English, when something is known. So it's not any activity, it's the activity, so people know which activity we're talking about.

And then we have: they present the information to the students at the university. So see if you can pitch together this sentence, if you can formulate this: They present the information to the students at the university.

De presenterar informationen till studenterna på universitetet.

So they present, and if this becomes too big, remember to break it up always. So they present becomes de presenterar, and then the information, informationen, to the students, till studenterna, so till is to, på universitetet, at the university. So you would actually say on the university in Swedish.

So if you got this wrong, don't worry about it. But typically you would say... on the university, when you mean at the university. So those types of words called prepositions, it takes time to learn when to use which one. Are you using on or at or in? It takes a little bit of experience.

Usually it's the same as in English, but sometimes it could differ. So what you have here is, De presenterar informationen till studenterna på universitetet. Okay, so what we said earlier was that you have words that are AR verbs, and you have verbs that are ER verbs. So remember that verbs are action words, like running and eating.

So the AR ones, we've already looked at. She informs, it ends with informerar, AR. Hon informerar dig becomes she informs you. How would you say he speaks with me?

Han talar med mig. So speak of course is tala. You can also say prata, both are completely fine, whichever you prefer. He speaks with me, han talar med mig. And mig of course is me, and med is with. They work here.

De arbetar här. Now if you've forgotten these, I would recommend that you listen through to the old episodes, just to make sure that you have those basics, because right now we're looking at words that we've learned in the past, and we are repeating them. And of course, if you don't want to go back and listen, you can still listen to this season, because we do intend to always repeat, so we can enforce the learning.

Then we have ER. So you have words that end with ER. So for example, How would you say to eat in Swedish? Att äta. And how would you then say they eat the food?

De äter maten. So as you can see here, it becomes äter and not ätar. Sometimes you can hear people say ätar as a mistake, not native speakers of Swedish but rather people who are learning the language. So for words that end with -er, it should be äter and not ätar. And we said there's really no way of knowing if the word should end with -er or -ar.

It's something that you learn. So when you learn a new verb, just make sure you learn the form of it when you want to use it in a sentence. So don't just learn att äta, to eat, but also learn should it be he eats, she eats, all of those are the same, so you should learn that form. And in this case it becomes äter.

So how do you say read the book?

We read the book.

Vi läser boken. So you get once again vi for we, läser that comes from att läsa to read. And then book is really easy, it's pretty much the same, bok but with one o, and then -en is because of the, so vi läser boken.

And then we have I drink water. So how would you say I drink water?

And of course to say I drink water, you say jag dricker vatten. Jag dricker vatten.

Now to go back to the past in Swedish, to go back to early days in our lives, go back to something that occurred a long time ago or maybe just five minutes ago, you need to use the past tense, the past form of the verb. And so, there are more than one way to do this in Swedish, just like in English. So for example, in English we said you could say "I have eaten", "I have eaten".

So you say "have" plus the other verb, and you use that form of that verb, so you don't say "I have eat", you say "I have eaten". And some examples of this in Swedish would be, for example for "I have spoken", you can say "jag har talat".

So you add the A-T at the end. "Jag har talat".

"Talat". So now let's look at "we have eaten", and for "eaten", to eat, you actually end with I-T.

Okay, so you would say "vi har ätit".

"Vi har ätit". So you end it with a I-T, "ätit" and not "ätat". And once again, it's because of these sort of irregular patterns that occur, where you have some verbs that behave in one way and others that behave in a different way. And the easiest way to learn this is of course just by repetition, and not by force.

And then we have "he has presented it". "He has presented it". And we know first how to say "to present", "att presentera". And then you have "presenterat". So how would you say "he has presented it"? "Han har presenterat den" or "det".

And if you're gonna have "den" or "det" really depends on what you're talking about. If it's a verb, sorry, if it's a word that is a word that starts with en or ett, it will differ. For most use cases... You can talk about "den". So you can say "han har presenterat den".

Or "han har presenterat det". So it really depends on what he's actually presenting. But in a lot of use cases you can actually interchange them. And a rule here that is useful to remember, and we intend to talk about it more, is to use "den" when you're talking about something that's tangible, like in front of you. Okay, for the second group then, we have the other way of going to the past.

And that is by using "A-D-E" for AR verbs.

So just like in English we said you could say "I have spoken". But you can also say "I spoke". So "I spoke". And what happens there is you change the verb, you change that word so it becomes a verb in the past, in the past tense. So how would you say "he spoke yesterday"?

So we know that "spoke" is "tala", right? And so we're gonna add on "A-D-E" at the end.

"A-D-E", right? So how would you say "he spoke yesterday"?

"Han talade igår." Great. "Han talade igår." And "igår" of course is "yesterday". "She worked at the office." "Office", if you've forgotten, is "kontor". Okay, "kontor".

So how would you say "she worked at the office"?

"Hon arbetade på kontoret." If you said "jobbade", that's also correct. So "jobba", you can also use. In fact, I would say it's a bit easier maybe to learn "jobbade". Because that comes from the same word as in English, "ett jobb" is a job. And you can actually make that into a verb in Swedish.

You can't do that in English with that specific word, job. You can't say to jobs or to he was jobbing yesterday, you can't really say that. But in Swedish you can. So you would be able to say hon arbetade på kontoret. You could say hon jobbade på kontoret. Okay, and how would you say we played football?

To play is att spela. So how would you say we played football?

Vi spelade fotboll.