Learn and practice grammar the fun and easy way!
Swedish is the native language of more than 9 million people and is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish. It is the official language in Sweden and shares official status with Finnish in Finland.
Swedish is a North Germanic language and is a descendant of Old Norse which was the common language of the Germanic people living in Scandinavia during the times of the Vikings. As a Germanic language Swedish is also related to Afrikaans, Dutch, English, German and Yiddish.
During the Middle Ages Swedish borrowed from German due to the merchant Hansa in the Baltic Sea. During the enlightenment period of the 18th century Swedish received loan words from French and during the 20th century English contributed to Swedish vocabulary.
Swedish grammar is said not to be particularly difficult. The verb system of a language is usually tricky. Anyone setting out to learn French or Spanish - or Arabic or Greek for that matter - learn this the hard way. In English, the verb system is not particularly complex and in Swedish it is even easier. Verb forms and tenses largely correspond to those in English but in Swedish there is never a difference in person.
Word order, nouns and congruence are the harder parts of learning Swedish. Word order in Swedish is somewhat counter-intuitive. Although English has traces of reversed word order such as in 'He is happy! / Is he happy?', Swedish takes this phenomenon to a whole new level.
There are two Swedish equivalents to the indefinite article 'a', as in 'a car' (en/ett). There is no telling which goes with which noun - this has to be learned and adjectives, pronouns and participles are inflicted accordingly.
In short, Swedish is a fascinating language, just lagom challenging to learn! Enjoy!