Is Swedish hard to learn? Or, to rephrase that question in Swedish: “Är svenska svårt att lära sig?”
This example sentence shows that Swedish uses a version of the same Latin alphabet used in English but with a few extra letters, two of which appear in this example (ä, and å), plus a third one (ö).
So, learning Swedish does not require memorizing an entirely new alphabet in the way that languages such as Korean, Hebrew, or Greek would require. That makes it easier to learn.
But some challenging languages, such as Hungarian and Finnish, also use the Latin alphabet, so there is more to the difficulty of learning a language than just its alphabet.
The difficulty of learning a foreign language is proportional to the differences between that language and one’s native language.
Linguists study how languages evolved from one another and group them into families of related languages, just as biologists classify plants and animals.
It turns out that Swedish and English are in the family of Indo-European languages (by the way, Hungarian and Finnish are not). In addition, Swedish and English are on the same branch within that family: they are both Germanic languages.
So, Swedish and English are related languages, which would suggest that Swedish is an easy-to-learn language for English speakers.
Indeed, most Germanic languages are relatively easy for English speakers to learn. Some exceptions include Icelandic, a Germanic language that has remained close to the Old Norse language of the Viking era.
So what makes Swedish easy and Icelandic difficult? Grammatical cases are a big part of the reason. They are changes in the endings of words that reflect their grammatical function in a sentence.
In the early Middle Ages, Old English had grammatical cases. But just as they have mostly disappeared from Modern English (except for pronouns), they have also mostly vanished from Swedish, while Icelandic has kept them.
To answer the question: “Is Swedish an easy language?” We must look at vocabulary as well.
In the Swedish version of that question, “Är svenska ett lätt språk?”, notice how the Swedish word “språk” is quite different from “language” (its English equivalent) but resembles the English word “speech” which comes from the same root.
In linguistics, words from different languages that share a common origin are called cognates. “Språk” and “speech” are not the only Swedish-English cognates. There are plenty more. These contribute to making Swedish an easier language to learn for English speakers.
Even someone who has never studied any Swedish can recognize some of the thousand most common Swedish words.
In linguistics, words in different languages that have a common origin are called cognates. “Språk” and “speech” are not the only Swedish-English cognates. There are plenty more. These contribute to making Swedish easier to learn.
Some Swedish-English cognates have Germanic roots because Swedish and English are Germanic languages. Other cognates have Latin roots because both languages have assimilated some Latin-derived terms. In addition, Swedish has borrowed some words directly from English —while Icelandic avoids foreign loan words.
Here are some examples of similar vocabulary words in Swedish and English:
| Swedish | English |
|---|---|
| snö | snow |
| båt | boat |
| lång | long |
| därför | therefore |
| månad | month |
| säsong | season |
| ekonomisk | economic |
| speciell | special |
Another thing that makes Swedish easy to learn is the conjugation of verbs —or rather the fact that Swedish verbs are not conjugated according to the subject pronoun.
For example, here are the conjugation tables for the verb “to be” in English and Swedish. Notice how in Swedish, the same verb form is used for all subject pronouns.
The U.S. Foreign Service Institute (FSI) teaches foreign languages to diplomats. Based on their teaching experience, they rate languages into four categories based on their learning difficulty (for English speakers):
| Category | Languages |
|---|---|
| 1) easiest languages | Spanish, Italian, French, Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, ... |
| 2) | German, Indonesian, ... |
| 3) hard languages | Russian, Hungarian, Thai, Finnish, ... |
| 4) very hard languages | Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, ... |
They classify Swedish in the easiest category, and in addition, they estimate that learning Swedish requires slightly less time than some of the other languages from that category.
The FSI estimates that reaching “general professional proficiency” in Swedish requires 24 weeks of full-time study. The same study duration applies to Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, and Italian, while Spanish and French take slightly longer, at 30 weeks each.
To conclude, it is fair to say that Swedish is among the easiest languages for English speakers to learn.