Swedish graded readers
Level B1
3 textsYou can follow everyday Swedish. Short sentences, a story you can guess, a few old word forms.
- Elsa Beskow · 1921 · 567 wordsBubbelemuck
A little creature, half mermaid and half troll, grows up by a forest lake and longs for wings.
- Selma Lagerlöf · 1906 · 693 wordsPojken som inte ville gå i kyrkan
The famous first page: lazy, mean fourteen-year-old Nils is left at home with a sermon to read.
- Selma Lagerlöf · 1906 · 372 wordsPojken förstår djurens språk
Shrunk to the size of a thumb, Nils discovers he can understand the farm animals, and they all have something to say about him.
Level B2
2 textsYou read Swedish news without much help. Longer sentences, literary words, older grammar.
- Selma Lagerlöf · 1906 · 440 wordsStaden på havsbotten
On Easter night a stork flies Nils to an empty beach, where a medieval city rises out of the sand.
- Selma Lagerlöf · 1894 · 657 wordsMorbror Ruben
A three-year-old dies after a nap on a cold stone step, and becomes the most important child in the family.
Level C1
1 textsYou read Swedish novels. Rich vocabulary, formal or old-fashioned style, long sentences.
How to read them
Start one level below where you think you are: a text you can follow is worth more than one you decode word by word. Read once for the story, tapping only the words that block you. Then read again, save the words you want to keep, and answer the questions in Swedish. Your saved words collect in one list across all the readers, and you can download it as a spreadsheet or for Anki.
Why older texts?
Because they are free for anyone to use: their authors died more than 70 years ago. That also means the Swedish is a little old-fashioned in places. The spelling in all of these is modern or close to it, but verbs often have their old plural forms (de voro for de var, de gingo for de gick), and some words have fallen out of use. Each page explains what to expect, and tap-to-translate knows the old forms. We have not modernised the texts.
Want to read something current instead? Paste any text into the Swedish reader, or check how hard it is first with the text difficulty checker. Not sure of your level? Take the level test.
Texts from Project Runeberg and Project Gutenberg. Summaries, glossaries and questions are our own.