Talk:Swedish as a foreign language

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[edit] Swedish-specific problems

The basic grammar is also more complex than, say, in English. The language has arbitrary noun classes on grammatical gender and plural, and various other irregularities. There are two grammatical genders, common en and neuter ett that do not communicate anything and are arbitrarily assigned to a word, sometimes even differently depending on the dialect. There is agreement between the referent and the main noun with respect to the gender. There are six ways to form a plural (-ar, -or, -er, -r, -n, and nil), which is also arbitrarily assigned to words. In fact, in Sweden, foreign learners are taught the words plural first. There are four different verb inflection classes (-ar, -er, -r, and irregular). Irregular verbs have four different inflections to memorize, one more than in English: present, past, supine and past participle (in English, the latter two are identical in form).

These are the main features that add extra effort for nonnative learners. For some reason, User:Panda removed them. Which parts are incorrect? --Vuo (talk) 18:23, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Allow me to first point out some errors about Swedish grammar in the above text.
  • There are 5 plural forms, not 6, and they are -ar, -or, -er, -n, and nil, according to the modern method that is used to teach Swedish.
  • There are 4 verb classes but they don't really have any names. The first three are simply the present tense endings (-ar, -er, -r). Sometimes the first two are called "ar verbs" and "er verbs" but I've never heard of "r verbs", especially since almost alI verbs in the present tense end in r.
Re: The basic grammar is also more complex than, say, in English. This would be difficult to substantiate without a citation. Many people in the world consider English to be one of the more difficult languages, partly because of all the irregularities in the language.
Re: "arbitrary noun classes": This is not a Swedish-specific problem. Any language with genders has the same issue, such as French, Spanish, and the rest of the romance languages.
Re: "various other irregularities": All languages have irregularities, this is not a Swedish-specific problem.
Re: gender varying by dialect: If you can provide some examples of this, that would be more helpful. Keep in mind that Swedish had more than 2 genders in the past and sometimes the archaic gender assignments may still be used in certain dialects. However, all archaic genders have merged into the en-form. I've personally never seen a noun that may be considered an ett-word in one dialect and an en-word in another.
Re: "In fact, in Sweden, foreign learners are taught the words plural first." Foreigners are normally taught the singular form first, as can be seen in many examples on the web and in texts. Not sure why this was included or what its purpose is.
Re: "Irregular verbs have four different inflections to memorize, one more than in English." This completely disregards that Swedish verbs are not conjugated, unlike English and many other languages. If you include all of the conjugations you must learn for each verb tense then you will be well above the 4 you need to know for Swedish, which would make English more complex than Swedish. For English speakers and anyone whose native language has conjugated verbs, learning verbs in one of the easiest parts of Swedish.
Re: acute & grave accent causing confusion if used incorrectly. You didn't list this above but I'll address it anyway. Using the wrong accent doesn't cause any more confusion than homonyms in any language. It's usually clear which word is meant by the context, even though they may sound alike (except for the accent).
–panda (talk) 20:19, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
Forgot one. Re: There are six ways to form a plural ..., which is also arbitrarily assigned to words. There are set rules for the majority of the plural forms, with the typical exceptions that can be found in any language. Many grammar books are very good at pointing out the rules.
–panda (talk) 20:30, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Grave and acute

The two word accents of Swedish is a very poor illustration of a difficult aspect of Swedish. At most, this difference pretty much only poses a problem if someone wishes to actually sound like a native Swede. The number of the minimal pairs is very low, and none of them are actually of the same nominal form, and are easy to distinguish by context. I should also add that there are dialects of Swedish that don't distinguish between the two word accents.

The difficulties of Swedish could rather be said to lie in the irregular declination of verbs and the use of a suffix instead of an articl to mark definiteness. The fairly large amount of vowels could also be considered difficult, primarily the front rounded vowels, which are comparatively rare. The general picture if you look at studies of UPSID (see, for example, David Crystal's The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language) is that front vowels are more rarely rounded since they're anatomically more difficult to form.

Peter Isotalo 10:38, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

The entire section on "Difficulties for students" should just be axed from this article as it's all subjective and based on personal opinion. It strongly depends on what prior language(s) a Swedish language learner already knows. I personally don't know of any difficulty with the Swedish language that would be considered universally difficult for all foreign language learners. Furthermore, none of the "difficulties" that have been brought up so far are universal difficulties or necessarily related to learning the Swedish language.

The acute and grave accents are difficult for people to learn to pronounce unless you already know a tonal language, such as some of the Asian languages. However, this doesn't affect learning the language, only pronunciation. How the different dialects deal with the acute and grave accent is irrelevant in this article since rikssvenska (that is, a version of Swedish that does use the acute and grave accent) is normally the only version of Swedish taught to foreigners.

For English speakers, the rolled "r" and Swedish "y" can be difficult to pronounce. The rest of the frontal vowels aren't particularly difficult to pronounce. Once again, this doesn't affect learning the language, only pronunciation. Many will understand what you say based on the context even if you pronounce Swedish with a strong accent. Compare it with the many variations and accents of English in the world.

For German speakers, Swedish is a very easy language that they can become fluent in in about 6 months. Many of the verbs and suffixes have similar patterns and many of the words sound similar.

Regarding learning verbs and suffixes for nouns, that's already been addressed above in #Swedish-specific problems and in the previous paragraph. (FYI: "irregular declination of verbs" is not the same thing as "verbs with irregular declinations". "Irregular declination of verbs" can imply that all Swedish verbs have an irregular declination, which we all already know is not true.)

Keep in mind that there is a difference between being fluent in a language (learning a language) versus speaking a language as a native speaker (pronunciation). As with any language, you can be fluent without pronouncing the language like a native speaker. For example, many Swedes are fluent in English but pronounce English with a very distinct Swedish accent.

–panda (talk) 23:10, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Pronunciation can run from a scale of native fluency to utter gibberish with many levels of uncomprehension between those two extremes. There are problems that are more or less serious, but the grave/acute thing is not really one of them and that some dialects don't make a distinction was just an illustration of that non-issue. Not being able to tell /l, r/ or long /i, y, u/ (discerning the difference especially between the latter two can be extremely difficult for anyone speaking 5- or 3-vowel language, like Spanish or Arabic) apart has much more potential for uncomprhension. The subjectiveness of this topic is no more a problem than that of any linguistic topic and different viewpoints (that speakers of closely related languages can learn Swedish easier than speakers of completely unrelated ones) is just a matter of reading up on the matter. A lot of the facts you've mentioned could very well be used to improve the article.
Peter Isotalo 12:31, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
The main difference between the subjectiveness of this topic and other linguistic topics is that in this article there has so far not been any documented evidence of the difficulties that have been mentioned. Everything that has been commented on so far has been based on personal opinions/experiences by the authors who have written them. Don't forget that that is considered original research and should not be published in Wikipedia. –panda (talk) 18:31, 6 March 2008 (UTC)