nine things that i wish i'd known about swedish before i started learning swedish now it's gonna be like a youtubey list of thing of going nine to one except there is a nine to one in my head but we're not going to do them in that order i might do seven then four then five and then i might just go four three two a little bit like swedish sometimes you can predict it other times no and if you're learning another language that isn't swedish which is let's face it highly likely don't worry you can apply some of these to your language learning as well as much as i can i've tried to make these specific to swedish because i already have a video about things i wish i'd known about language learning in general when i started and i probably need to update that video but this one more or less is just swedish let's try to be fun and let's try to educate the world about swedish and just before we get into any of that these videos i know it looks like i just stand here and piss about but really i promise i don't they take an immense amount of time and effort and because of that i appreciate your support either on patreon or by using my link for 50 off drops which is a good deal for you as well or 40 off speakly which is also a great deal for you i appreciate you using any and all of them all all of them all of them i would particularly appreciate but don't don't use all of them i probably don't recommend that anyway it helps me make the videos more often and more better that's how you say that in whatever language that was starting with number six yep there's nine and we're starting with number six speaking english while you are otherwise speaking swedish implies a change of tone and i don't mean the obvious way that a native english speaker would speak english because they don't know the swedish and they just say oh how do you say this i mean swedes or otherwise fluent swedish speakers who switch to english for a word or two or maybe even a whole phrase that implies something about what you're saying probably that it's meant a little bit less seriously or that it's a full-on joke to give you an example a swedish friend of mine was describing a friend of his who i guess you would say isn't for everyone he's the sort of friend who can be great to be around but he can be a little bit of hard work and he said acquired taste acquired taste is not normally a phrase we use to describe people there probably is a way to say that in swedish there's certainly a way to get across the idea that a friend can be a little bit hard to be around sometimes but to say it in english like that when the conversation was very much in swedish just show that he's kind of joking he doesn't mean this too seriously he just means that he's an acquired taste you're the athens and that carries throughout a lot of the things that swedes will switch briefly into english for english basically implies a less serious tone if they want to say something really properly and correctly then they will say it entirely in swedish if you went to hear a very formal talk in stockholm or something then the whole thing would be in swedish but if they were making some kind of joke a good way to let you know that would be to switch into english maybe an american accent to show that kind of hollywood styles that was number six let's do number three lots of people speak swedish what what what did you just say lots of people speak swedish yes don't think that i was a fool before i went into swedish i knew that it wasn't a widely spoken language i expected it to be extremely difficult to find swedish people to talk to to practice with i expected it to almost be impossible because i pretty much sucked at learning german and there's 90 million of those guys so i thought well surely with 10 million native speakers this must be especially difficult it's not 10 million is still a lot more people than i will ever talk to in my entire life the thing is when it comes to the number of people you can practice with 10 million is essentially the same as 90 million it's more than you actually need i know that statistically you should just find them around the place less often but the thing is if you go around doing things like i do like speaking to your kids in swedish and wearing swedish football jerseys and just generally making your swedish aura known to the world the swedes will come out especially in summer in australia they love it you just go to the beach in two suburbs of sydney in particular that is bondi and manly both beach suburbs of course in summer i swear you just go out there and just go edit on sunscott i have met swedes in the weirdest places in my third week of learning swedish i was wearing my swedish football jersey and i ran into some people who were speaking what i thought were swedish and it turned out it was actually norwegian and that's how crappy my swedish was i just recognized that it sounded like i should be able to understand it and i had a conversation with him then there was the time at a specialized lolly store what americans would call a candy store in like country australia like inland not even near the beach i don't know what swedes were doing there then there was the time at australia's only nuclear reactor i'm not even making that up australia has one nuclear reactor it's used for like medicine and stuff swedes there i don't they're everywhere that friend i mentioned before he's an air conditioning guy he came to my house to quote for an air conditioner heard me speaking swedish to my son now we get beers together you'll find people to talk to the more minority of the language then generally the more pleased they are that you're learning it because it's so unusual so there's plenty of people to talk to it really makes no difference whether we're talking french or swedish or norwegian there's tons of people who will talk to you it's fine moving on to number four men and women speak differently now i know that sounds obvious but i don't just mean that they say different things and that they have different voices that goes for all languages i mean you know the whole swedish pix pitch accent intonation thing that whole thing that is actually different for men and women i would say that as a general rule women have more pitch variation in their voice if you listen to female audio book narrators and male audio book narrators the males are flatter and when i started forming this theory and eventually i think have confirmed this theory i found it a little bit disappointing because i like the pitch variation i like going when i speak as much as i possibly can because as an english speaker it's not something i'm inclined to do so i deliberately do it as much as possible and that makes me sound like a woman even sometimes if i really nail how to say something some native swedes will say well i don't know there's something not quite right there and i once actually put to one of them i said is it possibly that i sound female but i've got a male voice and they were like yes i think that is it it's not a big deal there's really not that much more i need to say about it i don't it doesn't really bother me if i'm gonna talk a little bit like a woman if you're studying swedish and particularly if you are a female studying swedish you should know that you're trying to go for the more varied one you should try to sound like a female because if you sound like a guy which is reasonably flat or compared to female swedes that might sound a bit weird not a big problem like i said just something to know and speaking of the controversial topic of men and women and how they might even be different sometimes sweden is not as woke as you think now it has this reputation of being a one of a better word the wokest country in the world they've done certain things before other countries to a greater extent than other countries some of these things you'll agree with some of them you won't some of them people think the whole country is completely useless and it's not actually as dialed up to 11 as you really think if you watch some of their stand-up comedy and just their sitcoms and these things are like on svt play like this is like a government endorsed paid for thing for swedish entertainment saying these things that if sweden was really number 11 woke as it is perceived to be in some places of the world these things wouldn't be allowed some of their comedy is actually pretty edgy at least by australian standards i can't say for sure why this is basically the fact that the country is quite progressive and has certain attitudes or at least officially seems to allow them to make a very clear distinction between making a comedic statement making something that is meant to make someone laugh and not be taken very seriously and making a real statement about the world and as a result once i really started to dig into swedish culture and really started to understand things that wouldn't necessarily translate well with subtitles or anything i started to find a lot of swedish comedy straight up hilarious per copter and that ties beautifully to number seven so i have actually deliberately put those two in order swedish is not as easy as you think now just before you go breaking your keyboard to tell me how dumb i am in the comments i understand that from a technical point of view it's not going to be nearly as hard as a language very far removed from your own but i guess you could compare it a little bit to like the piano versus the guitar now on the surface of it which of those seems like the harder instrument they both seem pretty difficult but if we're talking about like a single note most of the time on the guitar you need to do two things at the same time you need to pluck the string and you need to put your hand on the fret the fact that the piano is easier to make a single sound on like you just press a single key and then boom there's the note makes the fact that you can do that not very impressive you can think of that a little bit like swedish you can say like a couple of words you can maybe introduce yourself swedes would be like yeah i guess that was okay in swedish the level that you're expected to reach as an english speaker before they'll be at all impressed by that is that little bit higher because whether they've thought about it or not they subconsciously know this is kind of similar to your language on top of that the accent is very very difficult it's basically english with a bunch of different words and no similar pronunciation at all like almost none of the sounds are made in exactly the same way consonants or vowels and just for reference to say i happen to find french much easier my accent without any practice is much closer to a proper french accent than my swedish accent ever was before i practiced and i found that reading novels in french came very quickly when compared with how long it took me in swedish and that leads me nicely to number five which is that pronunciation is the hardest part of the language and it will never really cease to be hard now look i get it that if you're new to swedish you might be sitting there thinking man then how grammatical i can understand and to that i would say comment but in all seriousness the grammar passes right you get to a stage where all the grammatical features seem more or less intuitive or if they don't then you can sort of take them in your stride pretty easily whereas the pronunciation the better you get at it the more things you see that you're just not doing right and it's just very very difficult and because of that i wish that i'd focused on that a little bit more early on instead of just speaking a whole ton like i did because although it seems intuitive that the more you speak the better your pronunciation gets i think i should have gotten better at listening if i'd gotten better at listening early hearing the difference between different sounds and also just focusing on taking in a whole lot of the language i think my accent would now be better or at least i could have saved some time that i've since spent correcting things that i did wrong in my accent accent is very hard and because of that i just wish i'd focused on that from the get-go don't worry the grammar passes the pronunciation does not so do worry and speaking of learning things early this is a message both to my former self and to you guys out there who are learning swedish just install the freaking swedish keyboard on your computer and learn to use it full time it's way easier from the beginning i spent three years using the alt code so alt 132 equals air i was quite fluent at using them i would use them without even kind of thinking about it but it's so much quicker to install the proper keyboard and learn where the punctuation and stuff has moved for when you do type in english and you guys know how i know you're not doing it because when you write in swedish every time there's an or you use o and every time there's an ear you use oh and every time there's an er you use oh no just dad you guys can't spell it's not that hard just freaking install it and on your phone it's even easier you can switch between the two layouts i thought not sorry about getting a little bit upright in all seriousness if you are typing in swedish just install the swedish keyboard and learn to type in it it's much easier in the long run and if you're doing it on a phone or a tablet again install a swedish keyboard and type on it it's just not that hard and that was number nine and that brings me logically to the number two thing that i wish i'd known before i started learning swedish which is that swedish is the language of books and audio books now think about what an audiobook is for a language learner as a language learning resource language learners in the 90s would have cut their limbs off to get a hold of as many audio books as exist in swedish this is language learning resource gold except that in swedish it's not at all like gold because there's so freaking much of it it's more like hydrogen it's language learning gold if it were as common as hydrogen swedes will get any book that is at all popular from pretty much any other language they will translate it and they will record an audio book i almost guarantee it which means that the books you've read before things like harry potter and the hunger games and stuff all of that exists in swedish and in audiobook form these are professional narrators people they're freaking amazing and you've got the transcription of it i mean what more could you ask for people are always coming to me saying oh there's not many resources for learning swedish well there's not many resources for swedish learners specifically but you don't need that you've got kids books la samayas detectives viral there's like 186 of them every single word there and you've got a narrator reading it out i don't know what more you could possibly ask for well i guess you could ask for it to be cheaper oh wait no you couldn't because books written to just ordinarily consume in the language are way cheaper than specific language learning resources now thankfully i have realized that in the last 18 months to two years but if i'd realized this from day one i would seriously estimate my swedish to be 10 better today those of you who have been keeping score will know that the only one left is number one you didn't seriously think i'd put number one anywhere but the end did you most resources for learning swedish suck don't use them specific resources that i do recommend are things like svt play it's a whole sea of different programs in different genres for different age groups with different kinds of swedish with swedish subtitles and they update it faster than you could possibly get through it meaning that it's a bottomless pit of swedish you could learn swedish entirely just from svt play svt play if you really wanted to if you don't want to do that my other tip is the various ebook and audio book platforms i personally use next story there is also story tell there is book beats depending where you are that may not work there is also bookmate that's better for ebooks themselves there is so much stuff out there both in printed form and audio form you really don't need things that are aimed specifically at swedish learners if you are going to use those swedish pod 101s probably the best one i found there is still a specific way to use that that makes it more helpful than if you use it wrong basically but you don't even need that you just need patience time svt play and one of the other platforms so through this video i've basically been talking as if you're the person who needs to know this and if you're learning swedish or danish or norwegian or to an extent finnish you do need to know these things if you're just starting out in this i wish i'd known this when i started swedish and i think these tips can be helpful if you think they can be helpful then leave me a comment saying they can be helpful that is helpful to me that's a lot of times to use the word helpful cheers i'll see you next time