Is Swedish Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content!)

For English speakers, Swedish is considered among the easier languages to learn. Its relative similarity to English in terms of grammar and vocabulary make learning it a good deal easier than many other languages. However, learning any language is a challenging process, and so you need to be ready for that.

Learning a language is a complicated thing, no matter which language you are learning.

It’s a big process that takes time and patience, but ultimately, Swedish is certainly one of the easier options to learn for English speakers.

There are a few reasons for this, so let’s find out more.

How long does it take to learn Swedish?

There are a few ways that we can answer this question to get as much of the whole picture as possible.

Many would say that the process of learning a language can be broken up into two broad stages.

The first is your initial study period, where you are learning the language with a teacher in class setting.

Of course, not everyone does this, but it’s going to make the process a lot smoother if you do.

In terms of how long this initial period of study will take, it’s generally agreed that it will involve around 23-24 weeks of full time study—or around 575-600 hours.

This is about six months of studying to get to the point that you are able to conduct yourself on a day-to-day basis in Swedish.

You can hold relatively complex conversations, and your fundamental understanding of the grammar should be solid by this point.

Naturally, though, you are far from finished at this point.

Let’s say you study for six months and then feel comfortable to go into the Swedish speaking world.

Ideally, this is what you would do after your study—immerse yourself in the language and try to use it every single day.

For the most naturally adept language learners, after perhaps another six months to a year of this, you will be more or less fluent.

While this will vary from person to person, we can then say that the whole process perhaps takes somewhere between 12-18 months of study and using the language.

Even then, though, you’re still going to be quite a long way from a native speaker, so there’s virtually always more to learn.

Given all this, though, how difficult is it to learn Swedish, relatively speaking?

How difficult is Swedish to learn?

I should first repeat that, no matter what language you’re talking about, it’s going to be difficult to learn.

Language learning is a tough and fairly arduous process, even in the easiest of cases.

So, it’s best to approach the learning of Swedish with this attitude.

That said, relatively speaking, Swedish is considered one of the easiest languages to learn.

The FSI scale in the U.S. judges the relative difficulty of learning a given language by categories.

These categories go from I-V, with I being the easiest and V being the hardest.

Swedish is very comfortably a category I language, meaning that it is regarded by experts in the field as being among the easiest languages to learn.

You only need to spend around six months studying it, as I said, to get a good grip on it.

Compare this with a language like Russian, which might take nearly double the time it takes to learn Swedish.

What exactly is it that makes it easy for English speakers to learn?

Is Swedish easy to learn for English speakers?

Yes, Swedish is relatively easy for English speakers to learn.

English speakers definitely have an advantage in this area.

Languages are classified into groups and families.

Virtually all European languages, with only a handful of exceptions, belong to the Indo-European language family.

Swedish and English both belong to the subgroup of Germanic languages.

In other words, English and Swedish are very closely related, and are thus fundamentally very similar.

There’s a good deal of shared vocabulary, the grammar is very similar, and in written form, the languages feel very akin to one another.

While, again, learning any language is never easy, being a native English speaker is perhaps the best possible leg-up you could have for learning Swedish.

What is the hardest thing about Swedish?

So, while the general consensus is that learning Swedish is relatively easy for English speakers, there are definitely still aspects of it that make it difficult.

Often, there is one thing that new Swedish speakers cite as the most difficult part of learning Swedish.

In spoken Swedish, there are a great many and very subtle intonations to just about every part of speech.

These intonations do a good deal of work in carrying meaning which isn’t clear, necessarily, on the face of the words.

Of course, English has this feature too, but in general it’s agreed that Swedish intonation is more difficult, varied, and complex than English intonation.

This, though, is what you might call a pretty advanced aspect of language learning.

This is one of the last things you will begin to get to grips with in the language, so you should already be pretty advanced by this point.

So, while some aspects of learning Swedish are clearly harder than others, overall it’s definitely one of the easier languages for a native English speaker to learn. It is relatively very similar to English, as well as the fact that the two languages are so closely related.

All in all, this makes Swedish relatively easy to learn—but still only relatively! Learning any language is difficult and takes time and patience.

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