![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
apps to help people learn Swedish
Nov. 11th, 2017 11:20 pmA friend of mine asked me today on FB for advice for another friend of hers who wants to learn Swedish. Having gone to the effort to look up some links, I thought I would repeat myself here, but in English this time.
The first thing I did to help me learn Swedish was to read as much as possible in Swedish, starting with books I had read many times in English, so that I wouldn't need to stop and look up words--I already knew what the paragraph was talking about, so I could tell what the individual words must mean from context.
These days I read books in Swedish that I have never read in English, and a handful of apps have proven very useful.
1. Sv-En Dict: This app is an off-line version of the Folket Lexikon, a fairly good Swedish-English on-line dictionary.
2. SAOL This is an official app by the Svenska Akademien (the people who have been in charge of the Swedish Language since 1786) which gives all of the different ways a word is spelled depending on grammar. Very, very useful!
3. Svensk ordbokThis is the Swedish dictionary I wished I had years ago. I have searched many times since moving to Sweden for a decent electronic dictionary in Swedish for Swedish speakers, but never found one--not an e-book, not an app, nothing. It has been some months since last I tried, and I wasn't expecting one to have appeared, yet, this week, when I was at the googleplaystore for something else entirely it suggested that I might like this app. Why, yes, yes I do! It contains all those words that don't appear in the Swedish-English dictionaries, and defines them in Swedish, which means that I get more practice with Swedish.
4. DuolingoI love this app, but wish that there were more lessons in Swedish. At this time I have gone through the Swedish lessons 3 full times. The first time I raced through it pretty quickly, doing each lesson as fast as possible, and not reviewing older lessons, looking for new words I hadn't already learned in the 5+ years I had been in Sweden before I found out about this program. The second time I went through slower, taking time to go back and re-visit any older lessons that the app thought had "weak words" in it (indicated by being some colour other than gold), with the goal of eventually turning all the lessons golden at once. I did that, then ignored the app for some weeks, and, of course, when I next looked at it again most of the lessons were coloured again, so I went through it a third time, and once again I have all of the lessons golden. Now the app thinks I am 56% fluent in Swedish. I know that my vocabulary is larger than the list of words it has given me, but I still often need to rely on the above apps to get the correct spelling and the correct form of the word for more complicated sentences.
5. Google Translate While this is no where near as useful as the Svenska Akademiens apps above, sometimes it is the right choice, especially if what I want to translate is a phrase, and the fact that one can download a language for use off line is useful.
The first thing I did to help me learn Swedish was to read as much as possible in Swedish, starting with books I had read many times in English, so that I wouldn't need to stop and look up words--I already knew what the paragraph was talking about, so I could tell what the individual words must mean from context.
These days I read books in Swedish that I have never read in English, and a handful of apps have proven very useful.
1. Sv-En Dict: This app is an off-line version of the Folket Lexikon, a fairly good Swedish-English on-line dictionary.
2. SAOL This is an official app by the Svenska Akademien (the people who have been in charge of the Swedish Language since 1786) which gives all of the different ways a word is spelled depending on grammar. Very, very useful!
3. Svensk ordbokThis is the Swedish dictionary I wished I had years ago. I have searched many times since moving to Sweden for a decent electronic dictionary in Swedish for Swedish speakers, but never found one--not an e-book, not an app, nothing. It has been some months since last I tried, and I wasn't expecting one to have appeared, yet, this week, when I was at the googleplaystore for something else entirely it suggested that I might like this app. Why, yes, yes I do! It contains all those words that don't appear in the Swedish-English dictionaries, and defines them in Swedish, which means that I get more practice with Swedish.
4. DuolingoI love this app, but wish that there were more lessons in Swedish. At this time I have gone through the Swedish lessons 3 full times. The first time I raced through it pretty quickly, doing each lesson as fast as possible, and not reviewing older lessons, looking for new words I hadn't already learned in the 5+ years I had been in Sweden before I found out about this program. The second time I went through slower, taking time to go back and re-visit any older lessons that the app thought had "weak words" in it (indicated by being some colour other than gold), with the goal of eventually turning all the lessons golden at once. I did that, then ignored the app for some weeks, and, of course, when I next looked at it again most of the lessons were coloured again, so I went through it a third time, and once again I have all of the lessons golden. Now the app thinks I am 56% fluent in Swedish. I know that my vocabulary is larger than the list of words it has given me, but I still often need to rely on the above apps to get the correct spelling and the correct form of the word for more complicated sentences.
5. Google Translate While this is no where near as useful as the Svenska Akademiens apps above, sometimes it is the right choice, especially if what I want to translate is a phrase, and the fact that one can download a language for use off line is useful.
