Learning Swedish?

[Thidrek]

Gotländska actually IS an own language.
Skånska is just a word for several dialects and languages spoken in Skåne, if I understood the article in the Swedish wikipedia the right way.

[tobz]

Several dialects yes, but not different languages. It's 'broader' than your normal Swedish, and also use a few Danish words as slang (is that the correct English word? can't remember right now...). Not that I knew this until I moved to Denmark, before I did that I could hardly understand a word that was spoken here. We (skåningar) usually see Danish in a bit like speaking Swedish with your mouth full of oatmeal, and I think that this is also how we are looked upon by the rest of Sweden .

[Svarthjärtad]

A mouth full of oatmeal? Hehehehehe!
Danish, for me.... well, it's really hard to understand for me. I think I may recall of one or two words that I remember. Finnish, even though it's a lot like Swedish - it's almost impossible for me to understand. Of course, I hail from the west coast - so if any other language makes any sense to me, is Bokmål.
The funny thing about dialects, they can be anywhere. I mean, I pick it up in the USA quite a bit. The town I live in and the town right next to it, in a way, speaks differently. However, Skåne, was once owned by Denmark, which explains the "odd" language. They skip a lot of words/letters and word things a bit differently. If you're not use to it, then it is going to take some time to get use to. For instance, imagine a person from California talking to a British person. Sure, it's all English - but the dialects are different - different words are used and in different orders. But, whatever dialect it is, it is all Swedish, nonetheless.
Whether you are listening to Vintersorg, Månegarm, Fronda, or even Tommy Körberg... it's all Swedish. Although, people such as Fronda, (I don't think) would never understand some of Otyg's text - and likewise. Hehe.

[lefay82]

what i'm trying to understand is: do you understand each other from a part to another of the country?
of course there dialects everywhere in the word, and of course some kind of expressions and words change from a part to another of a state, but the difference is so damn big?
are you able to understand what peolpe say in another part of sweden? or is it only a difference of intonation or pronunciation?

here in italy dialects are so fucking crazy, we cannot really understand from the top to the bottom of the peninsula. i live in the middle, and i can't understand northern or southern dialects, and above all the isles' dialects (for exemple in Sardegna they speak a mix of arabian - latin - spanish - french - italian tongue). i've found a nice dialects translator on internet and i've searched for the verb "to go" - "andare" and those are some of the results, quite amazing : allé, andà, vayare, sbiasciai, andär, anna', gghiri, gì, gire, ire, indà, ir, iri, ji, jìri, nare, nar, ne, scìjre, scì, scire and so on

yesterday i went to a library, they have the svenks ordbok, it's a long time that i'm courting it, so i decided to have a closer look to the volume (the price is high so i wanted to be sure i liked it) and i got very disappointed.
i don't know if is because the dictionary is made for swedes who want to learn italian but near the swedish words isn't written if the word is "en" or "ett" neighter the plural form, which is one of the most difficult things for a person who wants to learn swedish. and the irregular verbs were not conjugated.
the strange thing is that i found a smaller dictionary, with less words, but with the indications i needed. for example for flicka is written flick/a/an/or

[Thidrek]

Originally Posted by Svarthjärtad

A mouth full of oatmeal? Hehehehehe!
Danish, for me.... well, it's really hard to understand for me. I think I may recall of one or two words that I remember. Finnish, even though it's a lot like Swedish - it's almost impossible for me to understand. Of course, I hail from the west coast - so if any other language makes any sense to me, is Bokmål.

You mean Finnland-Swedish? Finnish itself is nothing like any other Scandinavian language, but related to the Sami languages, Estonian and Hungarian.

[Svarthjärtad]

Yes, but you see we use to own Finland many and many years ago. Sure, Finnish is a combination of many other languages, but one of them (as I have learned in school) being Swedish. I don't know about the entire country, but maybe perhaps only on the west coast of Finland.
Personally, I think the words were made up of a little child putting letters together with his alphebet soup. Hehe. It's very difficult to understand, pronounce, or even read. But you see, in Finland, sometimes, the street signs and stuff are wrote in both Finnish and Swedish.

Oh, and as a reply to you, Lefay82....
Yes, typically, people can understand everybody from all over teh country. It's just personally harder for me to understand people from Skåne, that's what I was trying to say. I'm really not use to their way of speaking, but I can understand it - it just sounds strange to me (as with any other dialect!). But yes, I can understand everybody. Yes, the plurals and passedtenses are one of the harder things to learn. People always think that the vowels are the hardest(EX: äåöé). WHen reallly, they sooner find out that it's not. Usually, when I teach a person Swedish, they find that the word order is most hard and the (as they say) "odd" pronounciation. Like, for an example, the word "Kärlek", you would think it would be like "k-air-leak", but that is not the way of it. Infact, at times, the K is also pronounced like a CH sound almost. Like, the Norwegian word, Kjem!
So, there are a lot harder things than the vowels.
Also, there are many ways of saying one word. Like "my", you can say "min, mitt, mina" and stuff like that, but generally it doesn't exactly have the same meaning. "You" is another one! "Du, dig, er, ni"... all of them are "you", but mean different things in a way. Compound words are difficult if you're learning, because... you may not be sure if they can go together or not or what should you add to them.
I hear people say that English was very, very difficult to learn. I don't get it! I mean I don't think that it's very hard, really. Maybe this could be that I spoke it half my life. Hehe.
So really, any language you want to learn, your best bet is to pick a dialect and learn from there. Because, any language you are wanting to learn, you are going to have somesort of a difficult time.

[Runk]

We still "own" Finland

[Svarthjärtad]

Originally Posted by mattsson

We still "own" Finland

Hehe. Yes.
You know, Finland is such a beautiful place - but you see, the people are (more than likely) assholes and dirty. Besides, Finland doesn't really have much to offer the world. We have the Ice bar/hotel, Norrlands Guld, Skruf, SRF, Legion Festivalen, and most importantly... Vintersorg. And most of them come into Sweden to work for more money. But atleast, it's not as bad as the Muslim problem we have - at least some Finns know Swedish. Muslims come and collect social money and just annoy everybody else.
...BUGGERS!

[Svarthjärtad]

Wait...
In a way, that really doesn't make sense. Some of us go to Norway to work for better money. I was offered to drive truck for both Sweden and Norway, but I turned it down. Maybe I should have concidered the job-offering? Driving truck would be great, one of my biggest passions.

[Rivfadír]

Originally Posted by Svarthjärtad

Hehe. Yes.
You know, Finland is such a beautiful place - but you see, the people are (more than likely) assholes and dirty. Besides, Finland doesn't really have much to offer the world. We have the Ice bar/hotel, Norrlands Guld, Skruf, SRF, Legion Festivalen, and most importantly... Vintersorg. And most of them come into Sweden to work for more money. But atleast, it's not as bad as the Muslim problem we have - at least some Finns know Swedish. Muslims come and collect social money and just annoy everybody else.
...BUGGERS!

Eh, from my experiences I like Finns and Finland a lot better than Swedes and Sweden. The language is prettier as well.

[Meanspark]

What I know about finnish is that they dont have the same roots than swedish.

Finnish have uralics roots. Swedish have german roots. Swedish/Danish/Norwegian are very similar (grammar, nouns, verbs).

Finnish is a very old language, it's the one and only language that is not listed as a part of a family (romanic, slavic, germanic...)

Im just surprised you guys (most of you native) think swedish is close to finnish. Totally disagree.

[Rivfadír]

Originally Posted by Meanspark

What I know about finnish is that they dont have the same roots than swedish.

Finnish have uralics roots. Swedish have german roots. Swedish/Danish/Norwegian are very similar (grammar, nouns, verbs).

Finnish is a very old language, it's the one and only language that is not listed as a part of a family (romanic, slavic, germanic...)

Im just surprised you guys (most of you native) think swedish is close to finnish. Totally disagree.

I speak quite a bit of Finnish, and I do know that it is not linguistically connected to Scandinavian languages, but I can tell you, there are a lot of words that are similar or at least related to Germanic words.

[Runk]

Originally Posted by Svarthjärtad

Wait...
In a way, that really doesn't make sense. Some of us go to Norway to work for better money. I was offered to drive truck for both Sweden and Norway, but I turned it down. Maybe I should have concidered the job-offering? Driving truck would be great, one of my biggest passions.

Yeah i´ve actually worked in Trondheim for six months,the money is clearly superior to the Swedish wages but then again it´s more expensive to live in Norway,best thing if you´re gonna work in Norway is to live close to the border in Strömstad or something.

[Thidrek]

Originally Posted by Rivfadír

I speak quite a bit of Finnish, and I do know that it is not linguistically connected to Scandinavian languages, but I can tell you, there are a lot of words that are similar or at least related to Germanic words.

Yeah, Finnish has alot of loan words from the bordering languages. Even words that are thought to be Proto-Germanic (spoken around about 500-50 BC) like "kuningas" or "ringu" (is that right? "king" and "ring"?) and thus the language is quite interesting for historical linguistics.

[tobz]

Originally Posted by Meanspark

Im just surprised you guys (most of you native) think swedish is close to finnish. Totally disagree.

Not Finnish as such, but the way Finns speak Swedish. And also, I hear Swedish is required studying in Finland.

Originally Posted by Thidrek

Yeah, Finnish has alot of loan words from the bordering languages. Even words that are thought to be Proto-Germanic (spoken around about 500-50 BC) like "kuningas" or "ringu" (is that right? "king" and "ring"?) and thus the language is quite interesting for historical linguistics.

Ringu is also the same in Japanese... Do we smell a conspiracy..?

[Rivfadír]

Originally Posted by Thidrek

Yeah, Finnish has alot of loan words from the bordering languages. Even words that are thought to be Proto-Germanic (spoken around about 500-50 BC) like "kuningas" or "ringu" (is that right? "king" and "ring"?) and thus the language is quite interesting for historical linguistics.

Yeah, exactly. If you look at the plain words, without all the suffixes, you'd be surprised at how much you actually understand.

[Defiance]

This is a very interesting thread, I'm a linguist so I like reading these types of topics .

But I guess that in general, Finnish would end up being quite different from Swedish, right?

I'm asking because all I know of Finnish is "kiitos" and "jää" .

And to the one who said Swedish is more difficult than German... well you are wrong . I know German, and believe me, I can tell it's more difficult than Swedish. Damn inflections.

[Meanspark]

I speak german too, few swedish and a bit finnish, Im not linguist but I know these languages developed similar words.
german 1-2-3 : ein, zwei, drei
swedish 1-2-3 : en, två, tre
finnish 1-2-3 : yksi, kaksi, kolme
It's possible that many swedish words are in the finnish vocabulary but imo, finnish is closer to estonian and hungarian than swedish.

Anyway, they both rocks!

[Rivfadír]

Originally Posted by Meanspark

It's possible that many swedish words are in the finnish vocabulary but imo, finnish is closer to estonian and hungarian than swedish.

It's got nothing to do with your opinion, friend. It's true.
I'm just saying that a lot of Germanic (and particularly, Nordic) words have been incorporated and "Finnified".
When my ex-girlfriend (who is Finnish) and I couldn't quite translate the word we were looking for, we would just say the word in our native languages, and a lot of the time, we would understand what the other one meant.

[Defiance]

Originally Posted by Meanspark

I speak german too, few swedish and a bit finnish, Im not linguist but I know these languages developed similar words.
german 1-2-3 : ein, zwei, drei
swedish 1-2-3 : en, två, tre
finnish 1-2-3 : yksi, kaksi, kolme
It's possible that many swedish words are in the finnish vocabulary but imo, finnish is closer to estonian and hungarian than swedish.

Anyway, they both rocks!

Hehe "yksi, kaksi, kolme," not really close to the others or to Spanish "uno, dos, tres" (obviously, I just wanted to put those words there hehe).

[Meanspark]

Originally Posted by Rivfadír

It's got nothing to do with your opinion, friend. It's true.
I'm just saying that a lot of Germanic (and particularly, Nordic) words have been incorporated and "Finnified".
When my ex-girlfriend (who is Finnish) and I couldn't quite translate the word we were looking for, we would just say the word in our native languages, and a lot of the time, we would understand what the other one meant.

Interesting! and you are lucky to have a finnish girlfriend.
In fact I dont speak very well any of these languages, you are the right person to know how different or similar are those languages.

[Svarthjärtad]

I would like to learn Ancient Swedish. I don't even know where to start to learn - I don't actually know how it sounds. I could go to Johan AKA: Arckanum. I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure that his text is in Ancient Swedish. It would really serve no purpose in learning it, for maybe fifty people know it throughout the world.
By the way, did anybody hear the new Arckanum release? I haven't yet. I heard a lot of stories about it though. Such as it will not be released on CD, just as vinyl - and there was only 500 copies printed - and it is only possible to order the album from a Swedish webpage. I don't know if these are true, I haven't tried buying it yet or even looking for it to even download as MP3 file. But, the reviews I have read, it sounds like a great album - almost as good as if a mix of Fran Marder and Kostogher.

But yes... I would love to learn Ancient Swedish!
YES! YES!

[Thidrek]

You should go ahead and learn Old Norse. "Ancient Swedish" in fact is the Old East Norse dialect and was spoken in nowadays Sweden and Denmark.

[Svarthjärtad]

I would really love to, but where would I start? Where would I learn even? As I understand, there is a difference between Old Norse and Ancient Swedish. Old NOrse is older and spoke throught the lands, where Ancient Swedish was discovered or like uhhh... invented once Sweden became its own little place. Because, what we learned in school - was that wayyyyy back when, Scandiavia wasn't really devided into countries - moreso territory like colonies almost. Colonies... like USA started out as. So Old Norse would be an older dialect, I would think it would be more difficult to learn. And as well... as I understand that Old Norse is more so like a Norwegian-bassed language.

[Defiance]

Originally Posted by Thidrek

You should go ahead and learn Old Norse. "Ancient Swedish" in fact is the Old East Norse dialect and was spoken in nowadays Sweden and Denmark.

Interesting, I really want to study Old Norse, but I'll do that after Old English and Gothic .

Ahhh so many extinct languages to learn, so little time .