Learn Swedish Online with LingQ

Hej allihopa! My name is Ben and I am learning Swedish with LingQ.

I love languages and LingQ is by far my most favourite method. I come from sunny Scotland, where there are not many Swedish speakers! I spend most of my spare time learning languages and blogging.

Today I would like to show you how I learn Swedish with LingQ and what is available for beginners!

Learning Swedish: Starting with the Basics

When you get started in any language on LingQ, it is important to spend some time getting acquainted with how the language looks and sounds. If you know or speak English or any other germanic language, you will find that you will pick up Swedish a lot quicker than you would think. There are plenty of cognates and Swedish grammar is very simple to get your head around. You may find that you will be able to progress at a good pace if you work at it every day.

It is simple to start learning Swedish with LingQ as there are many sources of beginner content. I have been learning Swedish only through LingQ and today I would like to show you how.

To get started, work your way through all of the beginner 1 and beginner 2 guided courses shown below. LingQ provides these and they provide you with many lessons where you can start creating LingQs. As you work your way through these courses you will build a bank of words (LingQs) and you will become more comfortable over time. It is especially important that you listen a lot, as Swedish is often pronounced differently than it is written. The Mini Stories are one of the best beginner resources provided by LingQ, you can repeat these lessons over and over to get used to common patterns found in the basic language.

You will eventually cover every guided course and eventually you will want to move onto content that perhaps other users have uploaded. Make sure you keep revisiting older lessons so you can become more familiar with your saved LingQs.

As you progress through your language learning journey at LingQ you will want to start working through more challenging and interesting content. There are many courses on LingQ which bridge the gap and will increase your vocabulary such as ‘Rivstart’ or ‘Radio Sweden’.

I have found that after completing the Mini Stories and other beginner guided courses, my comprehension has greatly improved and allows me to start lessons in the Radio Sweden course.

Radio Sweden is a great resource on LingQ because the original source is intended for people who are learning Swedish, the speaker will go at a slower pace and the articles are not too long. It covers a wide array of topics to keep you interested and it will greatly increase your vocabulary.

The best thing about LingQ is the import function. You can import anything from other external Swedish courses, videos, articles and movies. I have imported lessons from Teach Yourself Swedish and Assimil.

I use these privately and find it extremely effective as I can increase my vocabulary and I can listen to any of these lessons from my playlist on the go. I have shown below an example of my lesson feed where you can mostly see lessons from Radio Sweden. I have only been learning Swedish with LingQ for 37 days and I felt as soon as I got past the Mini Stories, I could start more challenging content like this.

My Method of Learning Swedish

I first learned Swedish in LingQ by using the LingQ Mini Stories. There are currently 30 lessons and when you start, you will begin to realize that certain phrases and patterns are repeated by different tenses or perspectives. I found this extremely useful as repetition and context is key to your learning and understanding of the language. The Mini Stories cover so much content and they will be invaluable to you even as you progress further into the language.

To grow your vocabulary you have to create as many LingQs as you can by turning all the blue words into yellow LingQs. You can also create LingQs by highlighting phrases yourself or you can use suggested phrases from other users. The yellow LingQs will be saved into your flashcards and they will reappear every time you come across them again in future lessons. For me, my memory is triggered when I see the word highlighted again in another lesson. I will start to remember the word without having to force myself to memorize flashcards. Create your LingQs, read through the text then read and listen at the same time.

When I am learning from a video, I often change the reader view to sentence mode so I can watch the video and create LingQs at the same time. Sentence mode is also useful for longer pieces of text that may be harder to understand, you can use the translate option below to help.

After you have completed the lesson, it will be added to your playlist where you can listen over and over during the day (e.g when you are driving, running or any other spare time). I listen to my playlist in a randomized order so I do not get bored. Every other day I will go back to older lessons and amend my LingQs’ “status” as appropriate. You can rate your words between 1 – 4 (1 being New and 4 is Learned). All the words that you do not “LingQ” will be turned into known words.

Importing Swedish content

It is important to enjoy what you are doing. LingQ can help you enjoy the language learning process and turn it into a personal journey. I have imported Youtube videos such as online dramas aimed at beginners, you will be able to find this on YouTube as there are multiple YouTube channels made especially for learning Swedish in an immersive way.

I recommend ‘Hitta Hem’ from the ‘Hej Hej Sverige’ Youtube Channel and the “UR Play” Channel. ‘Hitta Hem’ is a mini drama about a woman who has moved to Sweden to find her estranged father.

There are 20 episodes and each episode is usually between 6-8 minutes long. I find these videos very useful as the conversations that the characters have are natural and feel like a normal speed, this has given me further exposure to more natural Swedish. These channels also have many videos in Swedish that are subtitled and can be imported to LingQ.

They often make videos about Swedish life and common hot topics in Swedish. You can also watch shows on Netflix with Swedish dub such as ‘Bonus Family’ or even ‘Pokemon’ and use LingQ’s importing feature to help. I am interested in linguistics, language, history and gaming so I can import content from Swedish websites or articles from Wikipedia in Swedish as shown in my lesson feed here.

LingQ has an in-depth review system where you can sort your LingQs by known status, date created, tags, SRS and many more. You can customise your flashcards to be cloze, multi choice, dictation and others. I personally only review my daily LingQs that are sent to me by email, I look over them and do not worry about forcing myself to remember everything.

Do not force yourself to do something if you do not enjoy it, and when you enjoy the process you will love it and become a happier learner.

Swedish is a beautiful language, and by learning Swedish you will also be on your way to understanding Norwegian and Danish, as those 3 languages are mutually intelligible! You will get three languages for one! I follow these steps every day and I enjoy every minute of it, if you want to find out more about my Swedish adventure, you can find my blog at scottishlinguist.com.

Thank you and good luck everyone!

Enjoyed this post? Check out this blog post on Swedish language learning by polyglot and LingQ co-founder Steve Kaufmann!