På Svenska

It's tough to prepare for a move to Sweden, and especially, the transition to Swedish. I wish that I had spent more time beforehand. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. We had bought a few study books in the 12 months leading up to our move. But I never really opened them in anger. Big mistake if I may say so. There are lots of "Study Guide" books out there, but these worked for me: The first we bought was called "Colloquial Swedish", and is pretty popular. It's an English language book, split into about 20 chapters. Every chapter begins with a short story in Swedish. About 10 or so lines. After the story will be a glossary of new words from that story, and their English meaning. The rest of the chapter will focus on a particular part of Swedish grammar. Each chapter gets progressively more complicated. The book came with a cassette tape, which I have to confess I lost. So never got to find out how effective that was. It's a good book, and explains things well. But can become a little heavy going and, well, boring. While still in NZ, we bought (well, my wife bought, truth be known) a set of 3 books called "På Svenska". The author's name was Ulla Görransson, from memory. Anyway, there was an English book called "studiehäfte", a blue book called "lärobok" and a green book called "övningsbok". The green book was a book full of examples on grammar and sentence structure, while the other two books took you through Swedish by way of normal daily events and situations. Like little stories. They are really good books. But, the best part of the whole thing is that they come also with 3 CDs. Two CDs followed the study books, word for word. So you can follow along quite happily, and get a feel for the spoken word as related to the written word. The third CD contained a lot more examples of the things found in the books. Like, for example, telephone conversations. There are 2 or 3 in the book, which you can listen to while reading the text. But then, there are more (maybe 10) on the CD just to listen to. They mix them up a bit too, so there will be a child speaking first, followed by a teenager, followed by an adult, followed by an older person. Unlike most language tapes, I could actually hear what these people were saying. Personally, I found the "På Svenska" book and CD series to be really good. It is light to read, with lots of pictures, and is rather informal. A good series for kids to read also. They publish the series for many languages, so you need to specify that you want the English version when ordering. I saw that quite a few of my classmates had also bought the series. Once I got here, and particularly once I started with language school, a good "Swedish/English" dictionary (lexikon) was a "must have". The schools have them for use, but you have to leave them at the school, and you have to fight the really tough kids for the use of them. So, best to get your own. The other book I bought was a straight Swedish language dictionary, called "Svensk skolordlista". That was probably one of the best books I have bought. It will give you all the different forms for verbs and nouns, which most of the translation Swedish/English dictionaries don't have. As well as opposites and synonoms. Obviously, being only in Swedish, the definitions of the words are also in Swedish. But that's good also, as a learning tool. REALLY helpful if you get asked to write the definition of a word in class. I ended up using that book instead of the translation dictionary after a couple of months. Definitely recommend investing in that book.