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Zlatan Ibrahimovic
To: destabiliseus@gmail.com

The challenge of learning Swedish

Most Swedes speak English – which certainly helps a first-time visitor in Stockholm. But it makes learning Swedish somewhat harder, according to former expat Charlotte West.

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Newly arrived

I arrived in Sweden in August 2002 armed with Prisma’s Abridged English-Swedish and Swedish-English Dictionary and an eight-week intensive Swedish course from the University of California at Berkeley behind me. Four years later, the dog-eared dictionary had grammar notes scribbled in the margins and I had become a fluent Swedish speaker, more or less.

Swedish Word of the Day

A big part of the reason my spoken Swedish got good is that I quickly met Swedish friends who were willing to help me practise. One of our techniques was keeping track of our ‘Swedish Word of the Day’ on a list tacked to the kitchen cupboard.