Teach Yourself Swedish Conversation - 3 Audio CDs and a Booklet
Brand New (still shrink wrapped) 3 CDs and Book
This stand-alone, all-audio course can be used by those who have little or no knowledge of the language, by those who want to learn or brush up basic conversation skills, and by more advanced learners who require extra audio material to complement their current courses.
Vocabulary and phrases in the first two CDs are kept to the basics and are introduced gradually with lots of opportunity to repeat and practise, to improve your confidence in both speaking and understanding. The third CD concentrates on helping you improve your understanding, so that you will be able to hold two-way conversations with people who speak very fast or use words and phrases you do not know.
The course comes on three CDs and has an accompanying 48-page booklet which gives the dialogues and the translations of the dialogues, for those who like to see the written word or want additional practice.
This is the perfect complement to 'Teach Yourself Swedish'.
ALL-AUDIO COURSE – use anywhere, any time TEN REALISTIC CONVERSATION SCENARIOS – the words and phrases you'll need in 20 everyday dialogues LOTS OF OPPORTUNITY FOR PRACTICE AND REPETITION – improve your confidence EASY ESSENTIAL GRAMMAR – make progress fast, without learning boring rules or unnecessary vocabulary HELP IN UNDERSTANDING WHAT IS SAID BACK TO YOU - strategies for understanding what you hear, so you can have true, two-way conversations and not be thrown by the replies you get
Table of Contents:
 1/1 An interview
1/2 The interview continues
2/1 Booking a room
2/2 Booking into a hotel
3/1 Having a coffee
3/2 Having a meal
4/1 Taking a taxi
4/2 Travelling by bus and subway
5/1 Going to the supermarket
5/2 Buying clothes
6/1 Going to a fun fair (Gröna Lund)
6/2 Taking a boat trip (to the archipelago)
7/1 Going to the swimming pool
7/2 A chat in the sauna
8/1 Asking for directions to the pharmacy
8/2 Asking for directions to a good restaurant
9/1 Going to a night club
9/2 Making plans to meet
10/1 Being invited to a friend’s house
10/2 A dinner conversation
About the Author(s):
Regina Harkin is a qualified secondary level teacher with an MA in Swedish, English and Swedish as a second language. She teaches Swedish at Trinity College of Dublin and at the Swedish School, in a proect funded by the Swedish government. Regina has also worked as a translator, working for Microsoft, Dublin translating English software into Swedish.
About the Swedish Language
Swedish (svenska (help·info)) is a North Germanic language, spoken by more than ten million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along the coast and on the Åland islands. It is to a considerable extent mutually intelligible with Norwegian and to a lesser extent with Danish (see especially "Classification"). Along with the other North Germanic languages, Swedish is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples living in Scandinavia during the Viking Era.
Standard Swedish is the national language that evolved from the Central Swedish dialects in the 19th century and was well established by the beginning of the 20th century. While distinct regional varieties descended from the older rural dialects still exist, the spoken and written language is uniform and standardized. Some dialects differ considerably from the standard language in grammar and vocabulary and are not always mutually intelligible with Standard Swedish. These dialects are confined to rural areas and are spoken primarily by small numbers of people with low social mobility. Though not facing imminent extinction, such dialects have been in decline during the past century, despite the fact that they are well researched and their use is often encouraged by local authorities.
The standard word order is Subject Verb Object, though this can often be changed to stress certain words or phrases. Swedish morphology is similar to English, i.e. words have comparatively few inflections; there are two genders, no grammatical cases (though older analyses posit two cases, nominative and genitive), and a distinction between plural and singular. Adjectives are compared as in English, and are also inflected according to gender, number and definiteness. The definiteness of nouns is marked primarily through suffixes (endings), complemented with separate definite and indefinite articles. The prosody features both stress and in most dialects tonal qualities. The language has a comparatively large vowel inventory. Swedish is also notable for the voiceless dorso-palatal velar fricative, a highly variable consonant phoneme.
Swedish is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic branch of the Germanic languages. In the established classification, it belongs to the East Scandinavian languages together with Danish, separating it from the West Scandinavian languages, consisting of Faroese, Icelandic and Norwegian. However, more recent analyses divide the North Germanic languages into two groups: Insular Scandinavian, Faroese and Icelandic, and Continental Scandinavian, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, based on mutual intelligibility due to heavy influence of East Scandinavian (particular Danish) on Norwegian during the last millennium and divergence from both Faroese and Icelandic. (The earlier grouping into East and West would be more useful for the period before the period of Danish rule in Norway.)
By many general criteria of mutual intelligibility, the Continental Scandinavian languages could very well be considered dialects of a common Scandinavian language. However, because of several hundred years of sometimes quite intense rivalry between Denmark and Sweden, including a long series of wars in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the nationalist ideas that emerged during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the languages have separate orthographies, dictionaries, grammars, and regulatory bodies. Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are thus from a linguistic perspective more accurately described as a dialect continuum of Scandinavian (North Germanic), and some of the dialects, such as those on the border between Norway and Sweden -– especially parts of Bohuslän, Dalsland, western Värmland, western Dalarna, Härjedalen and Jämtland –- could be described as intermediate dialects of the national standard languages.
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