I'm impressed 👍. I'm Swedish and I understand this as much as you do. I learned English by ear, and I'm fluent in English, just like most Swedes are. So you do you. You are doing very good on pronouncing Swedish words 👏👏👏 Cheers!
A tip is to listen to Swedish films with English subtitles. This is how we learn English pronunciation etc. By hearing English and seeing it in Swedish. Then you learn bit by bit.
Dwane you pronounce swedish very well. I can comfort you that you will be understood even if you do not use this pitch accent. I am from Finland and my mother language is swedish but we don't have these pitch-accents in Finland. I have wisited Sweden multiple times and everybody understands me. The swedes say that my language sounds like finnish, but it is only an other dialect of swedish. I think you learn the pronounciation better by listening to people talking swedish and forget about these rules. Good luck I am sure you will learn swedish it is not SO difficult if you have an english background.
You did very good! I think you really have an ear for languages 😊 Also, I can't really remember learning this in Swedish class growing up. Usually it's just the context that tells you what pitch to use
As a swedish person, there is no way I would have been able to grasp all those rules of the accents during my school years. I didnt even know we had rules for them until today 😅
I am impressed by your willingness to learn the Swedish language. I have never realized how difficult my language is, since I am born with it. Your channel helps me learn more about my culture and language. Thank you!
Sedan skall vi inte underskatta inflytandet från plattyskan från 1200-talet och framåt. Jämför exempelvis var betoningen ligger i "betala" (från tyskans Bezahlen) och "Motala". Författaren Victor Rydberg på 1800-talet var galen på alla tyska inlån och ville rensa ut dem från svenskan. Exempelvis "betala" ville han ersätta med det äldre, pursvenska "gälda". Men Rydberg var en ropandes röst i öknen, ingen annan var intresserad av hans försök att "sanera" svenskan från tyska inflytelser. Nu för tiden är det istället engelska uttryck som alltmer tar över svenska språket.
The thing is, this isn’t actually taught in school- as preschoolers and toddlers we pick up this trait of knowing when to stress what thing without really thinking about it
Being swedish, its super easy to hear that the guy is from sweden, but we tend to lean towards the american accent rather than british, even tho we learn the british way in school ^^
Swedish learners does not have to learn this if they dont want to. I honestly never heard anyone learning Swedish as an adult getting the pitch right. I think it will be nearly impossible to sound like a native. But thats ok :)
It is basically impossible as an adult, but I also doubt that the average Swedish learner pays much attention to it, there is an Aussie on TH-cam who learned Swedish and moved here and he sounds pretty damn good pitch accents and all. But I my experience is otherwise the same as you, most learners don't get it right. But as I said, I don't think most learners puts any emphasis on getting it right
@@torrhap Same here lol. No need to learn the pitch at all. The context in what word you say is what matters. Like the word anden, i say it exacly the same for both meanings. No need to waste time on learning pitch.
My school mate learned perfect Swedish in 3 years with perfect pitch. But her writing skills are poor. But the language is just as good as any other Swedish speaker. And she is 29 years old.
Holy .... I am really glad I speak swedish as a native speaker. I would NEVER learn this today. (This also explain why I never managed to get a passing grade at university when we had a very short course in swedish grammar, for when I studied english. Apparently it was mandatory to have a short swedish grammar course when studying a foreign language... I did pass the english grammar, but not the swedish... )
I noticed that you pronounce most of the words with accent 2. Accent 1 is more like English, so I thought this would be easier for you. You will get there 😊
Don't bother with the pitch. It's only meaningful for a few words that have the same spelling but different meanings depending on the pitch. But even if you use the wrong pitch on these words, a swede will be able to figure out what word you want to say from the context of the conversation.
The correct prosody makes the speech much easier to understand. So saying "don't bother" is not a good idea. That's what they say at SFI, hence only kids born here gets it reasonably right.
Don't wanna make this any tougher but... I am from Gothenburg, and in this dialect we tend to put emphsis on the r's more, kind of like a mid-point of stressed and no-stressed. xD A little more often than not. :P
And in Skåne they do it their way, in Norrland another way, Finland Swedish don't do it at all, etc. But mastering the prosody of standard Swedish is good enough for a foreigner, to put it mildly.
Then to complicate it more: a word like pojke (boy) is stressed differently in different accents. As a southerer, Skåne, I use pitch one for it, while pitch 2 is what he used.
I think you did great! Dont let it discourage you. Native speakers learn this automatically without being aware of it. Most Swedes get just a confused as you from wathing this (since it comes natural). I think it's good to be aware of and to keep an eye on, but don't focus on it 😊 It's learned though conversation. And when you can follow converstion (or childrens shows, whatever) it's neat to look for the stressed syllable - but that's over-course 😊
Don't panic over the accents. It is more like a thing that you can start perfecting if you have an otherwise solid grip on the language. You can speak swedish/norwegian with native speakers without the accents/tones. Case in point with finnish-swedish, or the fact that the Danes don't even have it. So don't get overwhelmed thinking that you HAVE to nail the accents. However if you get fluent enough that you start approximating the actual sound of a dialect and you start applying the tones to your speech, that's when you can potentially confuse a native speaker by applying the wrong tone to a word. Point being that you need to be able to make the 'wrong' tone sound like the wrong tone spoken by a native.
You did so great with pronunciation including the pitch accent. I am Swedish as Second Language Teacher and the majority of Swedish learners don´t even hear the pitch accent until they studied Swedish (I am talking about people living in Sweden and learning Swedish btw) for a looong time, often years. The only sound you didn´t get right (and that was only when you try to read before the person said the) but after he said it you got it right, were "kyckling". If you want to pracitise the Swedsh prosody in a easy wa I can recommend the page "uttalarkivet". Unfortunetaly the instructions in "uttalsarkivet" in Swedish. But most exercises is with pictures so you don´t have to know the word. And the exercises are to distinguish prosody pattern, distinguish different sound and imitate prosody pattern, sounds. The page is made of people experts in the sounds of Swedish and how to teach it.
This was interesting. I think you did well. and most of the words you guessed the meaning off, was correct. A lot of them are the same in Danish and English, just pronounced differently, and with a few differences in the spelling.
11:18 This is not grammar really, and no Swedes except experts know all these patterns. People basically just memorize the pronunciations, just like you do in English. You will get it! And it's pretty much the same with actual formal grammar actually - you don't need to understand it in order to speak well...
You pronounce Swedish very good but I'm sorry to tell you we got 13 different ways to say a ch- sound (like in chicken ) and it is crazy spelling going on there 🤪🤪 My tip would be try to listen to how we pronounce our vowels, that will be fun to watch👍
Swede here, I think you repeated these words perfectly, regardless of whether you understood the contextual difference between these homophonic words. So, well done!
There are alsoSwedish words that have three or more completely different meanings. For example the word "För" which can mean "Push", "Because" or the Bow of a boat.
Always love Sweden day. I hope you find one covering the central west accent I speak with. The way to know with intonation to use comes mostly from just learning it word by word. For every rule there are exceptions to the rule. I'm sad he only included one pronunciation and meaning of cykel. If you ever want to have a conversation in Swedish, I volunteer 😊
I think the most important thing when learning Swedish is to talk to native speakers. The biggest problem is keeping Swedes from switching to English out of courtesy. 😅
No it's not the same words with different accents. The different accent makes them in to another word. Polen for exampel is Poland and Pålen is the pole or stake.
He speaks an americanised version of english since he's been influenced by their TV and films. I have made a conscious decision to speak the original UK version since I am Swedish (European) and abhore US influences. I also love to watch mostly UK TV (BBC Brit among others). The fact that I'm 72 also counts. The fact that I moved around in Sweden during my childhood makes my swedish more neutral than regional. Not his though, you may have seen and heard that he pronounces words that end in -or as if they end in -er, that's regional.
Dude, your pronounciation was close to perfect. Trust me, most of this difficult stuff falls into place if you take a basic course. Do Duolingo and record it for us!
Being from another region, I did notice some differences compared to how he pronounces things in the video. For example, I would say "Syster" with accent one. Same with "Väninna" and "Kopia".
I think you did well for a first lesson. You seem to have an ear for this. If you master the pitch accent, you're already ahead of many americans that have lived here for decades. If you can hear the pitch, you'll have an easier time getting the vocabulary correct. Just remember that in Swedish Å, Ä and Ö are separate characters with their own sounds and not just some variants of "a" and "o" with christmas ornaments on top. ... English speakers usually have a hard time with Å, Ä, Ö, Y and U since those sounds in Swedish seldom or never crops up in British English...
My head hurts as well, I'm 100% Swedish and speak and pronounce words properly. I'm insanely happy I don't have to go through this (though I barely did) 🤣 🤣 🤣
It could be explaned a little bit easier. One needs to know the etymology and origin of the words to get it right. My advice (as a former assistant SFI teacher) is to learn the basic nouns with the correct definite article, as this determines the definite form of the word and will also help with the accents. I can see in the comments that many say not to bother. That attitude is typical Swedish self-deprecation, and those saying so most often do not understand how flippant this stance is, especially toward people who really do want to understand in order to learn our language well. En katt - katten. The pronounciation of the indefinite form never change, thus katten will be pronounced KATT-en as it is a one syllable word. This rule works well to see how there is a difference between the different meanings for words such as anden and tomten. En and - a duck. Anden - the duck. (AND-en). And is perforce an Accent 1 word as it is has only one syllable. En ande - a spirit. Anden - the spirit. Ande in its indefinite form is pronounced AN-DE, thus the Accent 2 carries over to the definite form, AN-DE-n. En tomt - a property/lot. Tomten (TOM-ten) - the lot. En tomte (TOM-TE) - a gnome. Tomten (TOM-TEN) - the gnome. The next easy category are the compound words. The reason these use different types of accents depends on the separate words and syllables. The examples in the video are: lastbil, sjukhus, örngott and brandman. The rule is that 1 Accent 1 is 1 accent. 2 Accents 1 are 2 accents. Lastbil - a lorry, is a car (bil) that can carry a charge (last). Last is an Accent 1 word having only one syllable. Bil too is an Accent 1 word with only one syllable, thus the accents carry over to the compound that will become an Accent 2 word; LAST-BIL. Sjukhus - a hospital, is a compound of sick (sjuk) and house (hus). Both words are Accent 1 words. The accents carry over into the compound word making it an Accent 2 word. Etc. There are other compound words, with three or four parts as Swedish is an agglutinating language. In that case the parts determine the outcome. Varuförpackning - Vara (goods, ware) is an old word that still has the old genetive ending of u. Förpackning is a compound word made of för- and -packning, in itself a form I would like to call "Accent 3", as we have quite a few words that are compounds but are treated as single words, were the first syllable isn't stressed, but the second is. för-PACKning. Thus the double compound word of varuförpackning is really a three word compound and will become VARu-för-PACK-ning. An internet connection is "internetuppkoppling". Here the irregulariites of loan words makes itself obvious. Internet is IN-ter-net, or in-ter-NET. It hasn't quite touched ground in Swedish yet. Internet is a compound word and I believe Swedes treat it as "Accent 3" with a stress on the second syllable in compounds with endemic words. Connection is uppkoppling, another Accent 2 word. So, even though we often say INTER-net, the Accent 2 of UPP-KOPP-ling will influence the first part, turning UPP-KOPP-ling into an Accent 3 word, often making it sound like: in-ter-NET-upp-KOPP-ling. Dividing compounds will change the lexical classes of the words. English has had a detrimental effect on Swedish, and many people believe it doesn't matter if you compound words or not. They are idiots. A few horrendous examples are: Sjuksköterska - sjuk = ill, sköterska= nurse, but sjuksköterska is a title for a staff nurse, not an ill nurse (sjuk sköterska). Kassapersonal - kassa = checkout, personal = staff, but kass means bad, and plural of kass is kassa. Thus, in stores you may actually see signs at the checkout saying things about the store's kassapersonal (checkout staff), but in the form of kassa personal (bad staff). In a restaurant I saw signs that smoking was (supposedly) prohibited during lunch hour. But instead of rökfritt (smoke free), the signs said rök fritt (smoke freely). Särskrivning - divided compound. Sär - apart, skrivning - spelling. Sär skrivning means strange writing, which it really is. Most of the time it's obvious that the word is spelled wrong, but I have read texts, even academic ones, were it was not obvious if words were compounds or not. That may become costly if these errors occurr in legal texts.
Most of these words are nor really frequently usedm but its funny how gifter and gifter cand mean either posions or marriage based on the pitch. But even if you fail the pitch it will be obvious what word you are trying to use.
You're doing a really good job! Try record yourself talking and listen back to it right away and compare to the original Swedish word. That way you can probably learn how to "shape" the pronunciation to be more precise and correct :)
Just to let you know, you are saying almost every word with accent 2 where the accent 1 is supposed to be used. No hate, I know its hard, just thought you would want to know :D
We have parts of Sweden that don’t use this. You can’t hear the differens between tomten (father Christmas) / tomten (the plot) or anden (the duck) / anden (the spirit) when they speak.
Idé = - dwelling for hibernating animals, for example bears, see hibernation. Ide=Idea - thought characterized, for the current individual who receives the idea, by novelty and uniqueness.
As a swede, I can tell you that basically no Swedish person know about this. It's so complicated that even I gave up trying to keep up with this video. It can be good to know that words can be pronunced differently, even if they are spelled the same, but I belive that is enough. I would advice you to just practice to speak Swedish and learn that way instead. Then the pronunciation will come naturally without thinking about it. If swedes had to learn this way, we'd all be speaking some other language instead, because these rules would be impossible to learn.
Tomte nisse= Gnome Jul Tomte= Santa På min"tomt"vaktar "Tomten" till Julen kommer "Jul tomten" In my garden wath guards the Gnome to Christmas come Santa. And now funny Sweden. När "Julen" står för dörren När "hjulen" står för dörren. When the wheels stands at the door.
Do you swedes agree with the last part /jaäte kyckling / ? I think that's just lazyness. (I also hate when people write ja instead of jag) However, I don't use my Swedish very much so might be wrong.
Yes, it's normal speech, not lazyness. (Talking like it's written has always been uneducated.) Some dialects do it in other ways though, such as Skånska, or Finlandssvenska.
It's how I say it. And it's not something you tend to realize until you listen to yourself saying it. Also I didn't even know we had pitch accent until recently, and I'm 52. And this is only pronounciation. You're not supposed to write like that. Contraction is not used in Swedish writing like it is in English.
I am swedish (born 1973) and if I had written "Ja äter kyckling" back in school there would be a big fat red mark from my teacher. However, when we speak we often skip the g in jag, at least here in Stockholm. I've noticed its becoming more and more common to see people write ja though. Maybe its due to the fact younger people today more often write on a computer/smartphone/iPad and the program does the spelling instead of the human. Spellcheck would not react to the wrong spelling since ja is also a word.
More or less. You don't pronounce the G in 'jag', unless you're almost spelling something out. The R in 'äter' isn't necessarily dropped, I would say this depends a little bit on where you're from and how fast you're speaking.
And then throw in some cool dialects in the mix and it will sure mess things up! ;) /scanian btw, his english sounds good and american since we almost never du foreign tv-series of films and get exposed to a lot of american english from young ages.
The "accents" are in most cases not that important, I mean to sound like a Swede you need to use them, but usually it's clear from context what the word means, like "Jag ska ut på tomten" (I'm going out into the yard) wouldn't be mistaken for I'm going out into Santa, even though "tomten" can mean Yard or Santa depending on how it's stressed.
Actually, "kvinner" is the correct pronounciation. Listen to old movies from the 40's. Blommer, kolleger (both kollegor and kolleger is correct according to SAOL). I think someone wanted to differentiate between adjectives like vacker where the -er isn't an ending but part of the word itself, but our bureaucratic history is full of stupid political and ideological decisions. Spelling was wild before industrialisation and standardisation. For some reason those in charge chose a way of spelling that did not truly reflect the spoken dialects. The ending -t was inspired by French and was silent in the beginning, but nerdy teachers in the official and mandatory school system taught "real Swedish" as it was spelled, thus it changed quite a lot over time. The official version is "byggmästarsvenska", what the educated class learned. Dialects are so much more fun and interesting.
Tomten= garden Tomten= Santa Santa watch in the garden. Tomten vaktar på tomten. Or more Sweden axent Tomte nissen vaktar på gården. Thats means Sweden Tomte is a Gnome.
Another spelling-speking rule, words ending with -lig like in rolig prounons roli, trevli etc. (Exept of Swedich people who think the correct way is to speak like our written language 😉).
You think They, There and Their are bad. These short words that begin with Th are from old Norse. In Sweden they have developed over the years to begin with D.
Oh and we never write down accent markers, after all we're like the French, only mark accent on words that in their root form has final stress such as idé buffé karré and it's always over an e, in the first place so who cares. Unless it's à but we only use that to mean per as in £4 per item. à is short for Att.. which is like the tt in butter in Cockney. Bu'er. Gone. Yes there's a glottal stopp in à and no stress, it's never stressed. Swedish is fun to learn. I say that as a native speaker... although I bet 80%+ wouldn't say so... the ethnic divisions between Swedes(Academy Cervena), Geats(Pewdiepie), and Danes(me). I'm not Danish, I'm a Dane, difference is one is a nationality the other is ethnicity. And we're from the South of Sweden, after all, the original inhabitants of Denmark, moved to England.
Honestly, disregard most of this if you are just starting to learn Swedish. These rules are more for advanced speakers than beginners. You have to start with knowing words and work on the written language to learn and master how to build a sentence, then progress to learning the pronounciation, and lastly the picth accent if you are really serious about becoming one uf us sing-songy Swedes :)
Isn’t this just intonations like in Latin languages? I don’t even know if I put the stresses on the right syllable and I’m a 100% Swedish. I wouldn’t be all confused if your intonation was off. It’s not like with mandarin, Thai or Yoruba where it will mess up everything if you get the tone wrong
Now you can check out the Sequel to that video... Swedish Pitch Accents Revisited: Dialectal Variation. Let me tell you something, there are parts of Sweden and Finland, where there are no Pitch Accent. Okay there is only Accent 1, in them, no accent 2... So it is not really a must to learn, if you're going to move to like the Up North where no one lives.
Your pronunciation is qiute good! In anyway English and swedish is quite close.. its germanic languages! Some say that English is a bad spoken french, other say that English is a Scandinavian creol language! Non of that is truth.. even if English could be a creol language, but thats even truth for many other languages.. like French! Its rather this that English have more comon gramaticly with scandinavian langueges, becuse of Angels and Saxons, later Danes and norweigans.. even more later Norse-french invaders.. blame all the bad spellings on our Norse normandy ancestors! Its this that English resemble more like Scandinavian languages, in gramatical sens, becuse of the Angels, Saxons, Danes and Norweigans and those Norse-French speaking invaders! And dont confuse old Anglo-Saxon (old english) with now a day german language (High deutsh), becuse those Anglo-saxons spoke low deutsh.. kinda intelligble with scandinavian Norse at that time! Soo.. why are scandinavians and Dutch people that good english speaker.. good schools ofcouse but altso.. its such a similar language, especialy gramaticly and how to put up a sentens! The thing is.. as a foreginer.. one dont need to catch the right pitch accent.. as long as one can put up a right sentens! In anyway moste swedes gonna talk in english to you anyway.. becuse your swedish is more bad then there English!
You don't have to learn the grammar rules at all... Basic rules are SVO word order, even though Swedish is strictly a V2 Word order, like German... Correct Plural forms you'll learn conversationally, it's not that hard, common gender has 3 plural endings in -er -ar and -or, and neuter words have no plural. neuter words have the definite article of -et while common gender words have -en. And then the combined pl.def articles for common is -erna -arna -orna and for neuter is -en. That's basically all the grammar you need to know. Definite article and plural, genitive is like english apostrophe s minus the apostrophe. Like it used to be in English, when he+s → his. or her+s→hers.. cramming a lot of words and you learn it, practice speaking and voila you have reached A2 in 3 months, perhaps B2 in 4-5 months, and C in 6-7 months, and fluency, hahaha forget it, you'll find Thai easier to get fluent in.
You're doing great pronunciation! The last things he's talking about is in my opinion a bit lazy-talking and I recommends you to take that part lightly and speak out the whole words, just like you already do. 😊
I must say I'm impressed by your prononciation. I know people who lived here for years that don't do it as well as you.
I'm impressed 👍.
I'm Swedish and I understand this as much as you do. I learned English by ear, and I'm fluent in English, just like most Swedes are. So you do you. You are doing very good on pronouncing Swedish words 👏👏👏
Cheers!
The accent signs he's showing are for visualisation purposes in that video only. We don't use them on all words like that.
A tip is to listen to Swedish films with English subtitles. This is how we learn English pronunciation etc. By hearing English and seeing it in Swedish. Then you learn bit by bit.
The meaning can vary too. Jag går hém=I'll go home. Jag g´år hem=i'll walk home.
Dwane you pronounce swedish very well. I can comfort you that you will be understood even if you do not use this pitch accent. I am from Finland and my mother language is swedish but we don't have these pitch-accents in Finland. I have wisited Sweden multiple times and everybody understands me. The swedes say that my language sounds like finnish, but it is only an other dialect of swedish. I think you learn the pronounciation better by listening to people talking swedish and forget about these rules. Good luck I am sure you will learn swedish it is not SO difficult if you have an english background.
You did very good! I think you really have an ear for languages 😊
Also, I can't really remember learning this in Swedish class growing up. Usually it's just the context that tells you what pitch to use
As a swedish person, there is no way I would have been able to grasp all those rules of the accents during my school years. I didnt even know we had rules for them until today 😅
Yes, native swedes just know
@@Tekzoned Actually, as a Norwegian I seem to know, too.
Same here, we got the rules in the milk.
Same!
I am impressed by your willingness to learn the Swedish language.
I have never realized how difficult my language is, since I am born with it. Your channel helps me learn more about my culture and language. Thank you!
Sedan skall vi inte underskatta inflytandet från plattyskan från 1200-talet och framåt. Jämför exempelvis var betoningen ligger i "betala" (från tyskans Bezahlen) och "Motala". Författaren Victor Rydberg på 1800-talet var galen på alla tyska inlån och ville rensa ut dem från svenskan. Exempelvis "betala" ville han ersätta med det äldre, pursvenska "gälda". Men Rydberg var en ropandes röst i öknen, ingen annan var intresserad av hans försök att "sanera" svenskan från tyska inflytelser. Nu för tiden är det istället engelska uttryck som alltmer tar över svenska språket.
U did great actually. Like unusually good.
Well done
You have a good ear 👍 As others suggests, watch a lot of Swedish high quality series on the TV like the "Bron" and "Kurt Wallander"
Ah Academy Cervena, he uploads way too rarely.
Well done ! I'm impressed by your prononciation
The thing is, this isn’t actually taught in school- as preschoolers and toddlers we pick up this trait of knowing when to stress what thing without really thinking about it
Being swedish, its super easy to hear that the guy is from sweden, but we tend to lean towards the american accent rather than british, even tho we learn the british way in school ^^
Swedish learners does not have to learn this if they dont want to. I honestly never heard anyone learning Swedish as an adult getting the pitch right. I think it will be nearly impossible to sound like a native. But thats ok :)
It is basically impossible as an adult, but I also doubt that the average Swedish learner pays much attention to it, there is an Aussie on TH-cam who learned Swedish and moved here and he sounds pretty damn good pitch accents and all. But I my experience is otherwise the same as you, most learners don't get it right. But as I said, I don't think most learners puts any emphasis on getting it right
lived in sweden my entire life, cant replicate the accents to make a different lol
@@torrhap Same here lol. No need to learn the pitch at all. The context in what word you say is what matters. Like the word anden, i say it exacly the same for both meanings. No need to waste time on learning pitch.
My school mate learned perfect Swedish in 3 years with perfect pitch. But her writing skills are poor. But the language is just as good as any other Swedish speaker. And she is 29 years old.
Huh, I use the pitch accent all the time and hear it clearly in everyone I talk to. Could be regional?
Holy .... I am really glad I speak swedish as a native speaker. I would NEVER learn this today. (This also explain why I never managed to get a passing grade at university when we had a very short course in swedish grammar, for when I studied english. Apparently it was mandatory to have a short swedish grammar course when studying a foreign language... I did pass the english grammar, but not the swedish... )
You're doing well. Keep at it!
This is why "can you use it in a sentence" is so important for swedes when asked about a word
You are catching the differences reall really well! Quite impressive pronounciations actually.
I noticed that you pronounce most of the words with accent 2.
Accent 1 is more like English, so I thought this would be easier for you. You will get there 😊
Don't bother with the pitch. It's only meaningful for a few words that have the same spelling but different meanings depending on the pitch. But even if you use the wrong pitch on these words, a swede will be able to figure out what word you want to say from the context of the conversation.
The correct prosody makes the speech much easier to understand.
So saying "don't bother" is not a good idea. That's what they say at SFI, hence only kids born here gets it reasonably right.
Unless we are stressed or tired and get a brain freeze.
Don't wanna make this any tougher but... I am from Gothenburg, and in this dialect we tend to put emphsis on the r's more, kind of like a mid-point of stressed and no-stressed. xD A little more often than not. :P
And in Skåne they do it their way, in Norrland another way, Finland Swedish don't do it at all, etc.
But mastering the prosody of standard Swedish is good enough for a foreigner, to put it mildly.
Then to complicate it more: a word like pojke (boy) is stressed differently in different accents. As a southerer, Skåne, I use pitch one for it, while pitch 2 is what he used.
Syster with accent one as well. I'm also from Skåne.
I think you did great! Dont let it discourage you. Native speakers learn this automatically without being aware of it. Most Swedes get just a confused as you from wathing this (since it comes natural). I think it's good to be aware of and to keep an eye on, but don't focus on it 😊 It's learned though conversation. And when you can follow converstion (or childrens shows, whatever) it's neat to look for the stressed syllable - but that's over-course 😊
Don't panic over the accents. It is more like a thing that you can start perfecting if you have an otherwise solid grip on the language. You can speak swedish/norwegian with native speakers without the accents/tones. Case in point with finnish-swedish, or the fact that the Danes don't even have it. So don't get overwhelmed thinking that you HAVE to nail the accents.
However if you get fluent enough that you start approximating the actual sound of a dialect and you start applying the tones to your speech, that's when you can potentially confuse a native speaker by applying the wrong tone to a word. Point being that you need to be able to make the 'wrong' tone sound like the wrong tone spoken by a native.
As a Swede this is both funny and weird to watch as it all comes naturally to us. Keep it up =)
Tackar, tackar Dwayne!! Fran en Svensk i Spanien!!!
You did so great with pronunciation including the pitch accent. I am Swedish as Second Language Teacher and the majority of Swedish learners don´t even hear the pitch accent until they studied Swedish (I am talking about people living in Sweden and learning Swedish btw) for a looong time, often years. The only sound you didn´t get right (and that was only when you try to read before the person said the) but after he said it you got it right, were "kyckling". If you want to pracitise the Swedsh prosody in a easy wa I can recommend the page "uttalarkivet". Unfortunetaly the instructions in "uttalsarkivet" in Swedish. But most exercises is with pictures so you don´t have to know the word. And the exercises are to distinguish prosody pattern, distinguish different sound and imitate prosody pattern, sounds. The page is made of people experts in the sounds of Swedish and how to teach it.
Fun fact. Finland-Swedish (the regional variant of Swedish spoken in Finland), does not have pitch accent like Sweden-Swedish does
As stated in the video
This was interesting. I think you did well. and most of the words you guessed the meaning off, was correct. A lot of them are the same in Danish and English, just pronounced differently, and with a few differences in the spelling.
As a swede, I learned something new today
11:18 This is not grammar really, and no Swedes except experts know all these patterns.
People basically just memorize the pronunciations, just like you do in English. You will get it!
And it's pretty much the same with actual formal grammar actually - you don't need to understand it in order to speak well...
You did it great! 👏🏻 Don’t worry, we will understand you. 😉
You pronounce Swedish very good but I'm sorry to tell you we got 13 different ways to say a ch- sound (like in chicken ) and it is crazy spelling going on there 🤪🤪 My tip would be try to listen to how we pronounce our vowels, that will be fun to watch👍
You are very good lerning Swedish 🇸🇪 Dwayne 😊👍
Yeah, your swedish sounds amazing actually! That is, if you bring it you will blend right in! 🙂
Swede here, I think you repeated these words perfectly, regardless of whether you understood the contextual difference between these homophonic words. So, well done!
This comes naturally
There are alsoSwedish words that have three or more completely different meanings. For example the word "För" which can mean "Push", "Because" or the Bow of a boat.
Always love Sweden day. I hope you find one covering the central west accent I speak with.
The way to know with intonation to use comes mostly from just learning it word by word. For every rule there are exceptions to the rule.
I'm sad he only included one pronunciation and meaning of cykel.
If you ever want to have a conversation in Swedish, I volunteer 😊
I think the most important thing when learning Swedish is to talk to native speakers. The biggest problem is keeping Swedes from switching to English out of courtesy. 😅
No it's not the same words with different accents. The different accent makes them in to another word. Polen for exampel is Poland and Pålen is the pole or stake.
He speaks an americanised version of english since he's been influenced by their TV and films. I have made a conscious decision to speak the original UK version since I am Swedish (European) and abhore US influences. I also love to watch mostly UK TV (BBC Brit among others). The fact that I'm 72 also counts.
The fact that I moved around in Sweden during my childhood makes my swedish more neutral than regional. Not his though, you may have seen and heard that he pronounces words that end in -or as if they end in -er, that's regional.
Dude, your pronounciation was close to perfect. Trust me, most of this difficult stuff falls into place if you take a basic course. Do Duolingo and record it for us!
Then on top of all that you add the different dialekts depending on where in Sweden you are. :) You can do it!
Being from another region, I did notice some differences compared to how he pronounces things in the video. For example, I would say "Syster" with accent one. Same with "Väninna" and "Kopia".
I think you did well for a first lesson. You seem to have an ear for this. If you master the pitch accent, you're already ahead of many americans that have lived here for decades. If you can hear the pitch, you'll have an easier time getting the vocabulary correct.
Just remember that in Swedish Å, Ä and Ö are separate characters with their own sounds and not just some variants of "a" and "o" with christmas ornaments on top.
... English speakers usually have a hard time with Å, Ä, Ö, Y and U since those sounds in Swedish seldom or never crops up in British English...
Tomte nisse= Gnome
Jul Tomte= Santa
My head hurts as well, I'm 100% Swedish and speak and pronounce words properly. I'm insanely happy I don't have to go through this (though I barely did) 🤣 🤣 🤣
It could be explaned a little bit easier. One needs to know the etymology and origin of the words to get it right. My advice (as a former assistant SFI teacher) is to learn the basic nouns with the correct definite article, as this determines the definite form of the word and will also help with the accents. I can see in the comments that many say not to bother. That attitude is typical Swedish self-deprecation, and those saying so most often do not understand how flippant this stance is, especially toward people who really do want to understand in order to learn our language well.
En katt - katten. The pronounciation of the indefinite form never change, thus katten will be pronounced KATT-en as it is a one syllable word.
This rule works well to see how there is a difference between the different meanings for words such as anden and tomten.
En and - a duck. Anden - the duck. (AND-en). And is perforce an Accent 1 word as it is has only one syllable.
En ande - a spirit. Anden - the spirit. Ande in its indefinite form is pronounced AN-DE, thus the Accent 2 carries over to the definite form, AN-DE-n.
En tomt - a property/lot. Tomten (TOM-ten) - the lot.
En tomte (TOM-TE) - a gnome. Tomten (TOM-TEN) - the gnome.
The next easy category are the compound words. The reason these use different types of accents depends on the separate words and syllables. The examples in the video are: lastbil, sjukhus, örngott and brandman. The rule is that 1 Accent 1 is 1 accent. 2 Accents 1 are 2 accents.
Lastbil - a lorry, is a car (bil) that can carry a charge (last). Last is an Accent 1 word having only one syllable. Bil too is an Accent 1 word with only one syllable, thus the accents carry over to the compound that will become an Accent 2 word; LAST-BIL.
Sjukhus - a hospital, is a compound of sick (sjuk) and house (hus). Both words are Accent 1 words. The accents carry over into the compound word making it an Accent 2 word. Etc.
There are other compound words, with three or four parts as Swedish is an agglutinating language. In that case the parts determine the outcome.
Varuförpackning - Vara (goods, ware) is an old word that still has the old genetive ending of u. Förpackning is a compound word made of för- and -packning, in itself a form I would like to call "Accent 3", as we have quite a few words that are compounds but are treated as single words, were the first syllable isn't stressed, but the second is. för-PACKning. Thus the double compound word of varuförpackning is really a three word compound and will become VARu-för-PACK-ning.
An internet connection is "internetuppkoppling". Here the irregulariites of loan words makes itself obvious. Internet is IN-ter-net, or in-ter-NET. It hasn't quite touched ground in Swedish yet. Internet is a compound word and I believe Swedes treat it as "Accent 3" with a stress on the second syllable in compounds with endemic words. Connection is uppkoppling, another Accent 2 word. So, even though we often say INTER-net, the Accent 2 of UPP-KOPP-ling will influence the first part, turning UPP-KOPP-ling into an Accent 3 word, often making it sound like: in-ter-NET-upp-KOPP-ling.
Dividing compounds will change the lexical classes of the words. English has had a detrimental effect on Swedish, and many people believe it doesn't matter if you compound words or not. They are idiots. A few horrendous examples are:
Sjuksköterska - sjuk = ill, sköterska= nurse, but sjuksköterska is a title for a staff nurse, not an ill nurse (sjuk sköterska).
Kassapersonal - kassa = checkout, personal = staff, but kass means bad, and plural of kass is kassa. Thus, in stores you may actually see signs at the checkout saying things about the store's kassapersonal (checkout staff), but in the form of kassa personal (bad staff).
In a restaurant I saw signs that smoking was (supposedly) prohibited during lunch hour. But instead of rökfritt (smoke free), the signs said rök fritt (smoke freely).
Särskrivning - divided compound. Sär - apart, skrivning - spelling. Sär skrivning means strange writing, which it really is.
Most of the time it's obvious that the word is spelled wrong, but I have read texts, even academic ones, were it was not obvious if words were compounds or not. That may become costly if these errors occurr in legal texts.
I think it's also interesting because it's not something we think about. :)
You talk Very good !!!! But sorry i laugh bit 😂😂😂
Yes I laughed when he tried to pronounce kyckling! 😄
I think that you did well and i understood what you where saying in swedish with some training you will get the words even more
Most of these words are nor really frequently usedm but its funny how gifter and gifter cand mean either posions or marriage based on the pitch. But even if you fail the pitch it will be obvious what word you are trying to use.
His english sounds Swedish to me 😅
Edit: You can definitely learn the pitch.
You're doing a really good job! Try record yourself talking and listen back to it right away and compare to the original Swedish word. That way you can probably learn how to "shape" the pronunciation to be more precise and correct :)
It would be fun if you reacted to the video Robert gustafsson testar dialekter. Wher he dos dialekts from difrent parts of sweden
Just to let you know, you are saying almost every word with accent 2 where the accent 1 is supposed to be used. No hate, I know its hard, just thought you would want to know :D
We have parts of Sweden that don’t use this. You can’t hear the differens between tomten (father Christmas) / tomten (the plot) or anden (the duck) / anden (the spirit) when they speak.
Idé = - dwelling for hibernating animals, for example bears, see hibernation.
Ide=Idea - thought characterized, for the current individual who receives the idea, by novelty and uniqueness.
It's the other way around idé is idea.
I knew the guy who made that video before he started doing videos 😛
Du kan göra det! Du kan lära dig svenska så länge du har viljan.
You can do it! You can learn Swedish as long as you have the desire.
As a swede, I can tell you that basically no Swedish person know about this. It's so complicated that even I gave up trying to keep up with this video. It can be good to know that words can be pronunced differently, even if they are spelled the same, but I belive that is enough. I would advice you to just practice to speak Swedish and learn that way instead. Then the pronunciation will come naturally without thinking about it. If swedes had to learn this way, we'd all be speaking some other language instead, because these rules would be impossible to learn.
you have a very good listening ear
Don´t worry. You did very well. And context is still the key for understanding, not a precise prenounciation.
Good man yerself!
Tomte nisse= Gnome
Jul Tomte= Santa
På min"tomt"vaktar
"Tomten"
till Julen
kommer "Jul tomten"
In my garden wath
guards the Gnome
to Christmas come
Santa.
And now funny Sweden.
När "Julen" står för
dörren
När "hjulen" står för dörren.
When the wheels stands at the door.
Do you swedes agree with the last part /jaäte kyckling / ?
I think that's just lazyness. (I also hate when people write ja instead of jag)
However, I don't use my Swedish very much so might be wrong.
Yes, it's normal speech, not lazyness.
(Talking like it's written has always been uneducated.)
Some dialects do it in other ways though, such as Skånska, or Finlandssvenska.
It's how I say it. And it's not something you tend to realize until you listen to yourself saying it.
Also I didn't even know we had pitch accent until recently, and I'm 52.
And this is only pronounciation. You're not supposed to write like that. Contraction is not used in Swedish writing like it is in English.
I am swedish (born 1973) and if I had written "Ja äter kyckling" back in school there would be a big fat red mark from my teacher. However, when we speak we often skip the g in jag, at least here in Stockholm. I've noticed its becoming more and more common to see people write ja though. Maybe its due to the fact younger people today more often write on a computer/smartphone/iPad and the program does the spelling instead of the human. Spellcheck would not react to the wrong spelling since ja is also a word.
More or less. You don't pronounce the G in 'jag', unless you're almost spelling something out. The R in 'äter' isn't necessarily dropped, I would say this depends a little bit on where you're from and how fast you're speaking.
@@Rakhtor Contraction was used a lot in Swedish writing until pretty recently.
And then throw in some cool dialects in the mix and it will sure mess things up! ;) /scanian
btw, his english sounds good and american since we almost never du foreign tv-series of films and get exposed to a lot of american english from young ages.
The "accents" are in most cases not that important, I mean to sound like a Swede you need to use them, but usually it's clear from context what the word means, like "Jag ska ut på tomten" (I'm going out into the yard) wouldn't be mistaken for I'm going out into Santa, even though "tomten" can mean Yard or Santa depending on how it's stressed.
I'm getting annoyed at that he continues to say "kvinner" and not the correct "kvinnor".
Röker...såna som man eter. 😂
Stockholmska är och förblir det enda rätta.
Actually, "kvinner" is the correct pronounciation. Listen to old movies from the 40's. Blommer, kolleger (both kollegor and kolleger is correct according to SAOL). I think someone wanted to differentiate between adjectives like vacker where the -er isn't an ending but part of the word itself, but our bureaucratic history is full of stupid political and ideological decisions.
Spelling was wild before industrialisation and standardisation. For some reason those in charge chose a way of spelling that did not truly reflect the spoken dialects. The ending -t was inspired by French and was silent in the beginning, but nerdy teachers in the official and mandatory school system taught "real Swedish" as it was spelled, thus it changed quite a lot over time. The official version is "byggmästarsvenska", what the educated class learned. Dialects are so much more fun and interesting.
Tomten= garden
Tomten= Santa
Santa watch in the garden.
Tomten vaktar på tomten.
Or more Sweden axent
Tomte nissen vaktar
på gården.
Thats means Sweden
Tomte is a Gnome.
Another spelling-speking rule, words ending with -lig like in rolig prounons roli, trevli etc. (Exept of Swedich people who think the correct way is to speak like our written language 😉).
Not hard - we just do it :-)
You think They, There and Their are bad. These short words that begin with Th are from old Norse. In Sweden they have developed over the years to begin with D.
Oh and we never write down accent markers, after all we're like the French, only mark accent on words that in their root form has final stress such as idé buffé karré and it's always over an e, in the first place so who cares. Unless it's à but we only use that to mean per as in £4 per item. à is short for Att.. which is like the tt in butter in Cockney. Bu'er. Gone. Yes there's a glottal stopp in à and no stress, it's never stressed.
Swedish is fun to learn. I say that as a native speaker... although I bet 80%+ wouldn't say so... the ethnic divisions between Swedes(Academy Cervena), Geats(Pewdiepie), and Danes(me).
I'm not Danish, I'm a Dane, difference is one is a nationality the other is ethnicity. And we're from the South of Sweden, after all, the original inhabitants of Denmark, moved to England.
As a swede, i didn't learn anything from this😭😭
You're using accent 1 for both 1 and 2.
Anden = (The) Mallard.
99% of swedes don't know the difference between a duck and mallard...
Honestly, disregard most of this if you are just starting to learn Swedish. These rules are more for advanced speakers than beginners. You have to start with knowing words and work on the written language to learn and master how to build a sentence, then progress to learning the pronounciation, and lastly the picth accent if you are really serious about becoming one uf us sing-songy Swedes :)
Isn’t this just intonations like in Latin languages? I don’t even know if I put the stresses on the right syllable and I’m a 100% Swedish. I wouldn’t be all confused if your intonation was off. It’s not like with mandarin, Thai or Yoruba where it will mess up everything if you get the tone wrong
Now you can check out the Sequel to that video... Swedish Pitch Accents Revisited: Dialectal Variation. Let me tell you something, there are parts of Sweden and Finland, where there are no Pitch Accent. Okay there is only Accent 1, in them, no accent 2... So it is not really a must to learn, if you're going to move to like the Up North where no one lives.
Varför måste lära sig detta bara om han ska flytta upp till Norrland??? Du säger ju att det ändå inte bor nån där 🤔 Hälsningar från Norrland 👋
"Godis" is not a loan word. It's just a form of "god", ie "good", just like "goodies" in English.
Your pronunciation is qiute good!
In anyway English and swedish is quite close.. its germanic languages!
Some say that English is a bad spoken french, other say that English is a Scandinavian creol language!
Non of that is truth.. even if English could be a creol language, but thats even truth for many other languages.. like French!
Its rather this that English have more comon gramaticly with scandinavian langueges, becuse of Angels and Saxons, later Danes and norweigans.. even more later Norse-french invaders.. blame all the bad spellings on our Norse normandy ancestors!
Its this that English resemble more like Scandinavian languages, in gramatical sens, becuse of the Angels, Saxons, Danes and Norweigans and those Norse-French speaking invaders!
And dont confuse old Anglo-Saxon (old english) with now a day german language (High deutsh), becuse those Anglo-saxons spoke low deutsh.. kinda intelligble with scandinavian Norse at that time!
Soo.. why are scandinavians and Dutch people that good english speaker.. good schools ofcouse but altso.. its such a similar language, especialy gramaticly and how to put up a sentens!
The thing is.. as a foreginer.. one dont need to catch the right pitch accent.. as long as one can put up a right sentens!
In anyway moste swedes gonna talk in english to you anyway.. becuse your swedish is more bad then there English!
Another importent thing, if you want to speak proper swedish, you realy have to get the "R"s be fairly sharp and on the tip of the tongue.
You don't have to learn the grammar rules at all... Basic rules are SVO word order, even though Swedish is strictly a V2 Word order, like German...
Correct Plural forms you'll learn conversationally, it's not that hard, common gender has 3 plural endings in -er -ar and -or, and neuter words have no plural.
neuter words have the definite article of -et while common gender words have -en. And then the combined pl.def articles for common is -erna -arna -orna and for neuter is -en.
That's basically all the grammar you need to know. Definite article and plural, genitive is like english apostrophe s minus the apostrophe. Like it used to be in English, when he+s → his. or her+s→hers..
cramming a lot of words and you learn it, practice speaking and voila you have reached A2 in 3 months, perhaps B2 in 4-5 months, and C in 6-7 months, and fluency, hahaha forget it, you'll find Thai easier to get fluent in.
You're doing great pronunciation! The last things he's talking about is in my opinion a bit lazy-talking and I recommends you to take that part lightly and speak out the whole words, just like you already do. 😊
These are _not_ totally similar to the two pitch accent of Norwegian, are they? Bønder (1) - bønner (2)
- Confused Norwegian
Oo noo you cant learn to speak and get it right in writing and reading. Its total different how you speak and read or write.
dont get scared of å ä ö 😄