My experience with learning Swedish

Hej hej!

One of my biggest goals when moving to Sweden was to learn Swedish. I think it is essential to learn the local language if you want to really immerse yourself in the swedish culture. While you can certainly get by with only speaking English in your day-to-day life, things like finding swedish friends and enjoying local events are made much easier with a decent knowledge of Swedish.

Luckily there are several possibilities for you as a LiU student to learn the language. The first one is the Swedish course organised by the university. This is the option I took for my first semester and I just completed the course on the A1 level. I found the course enjoyable to follow, but it was not that heavy on actually talking swedish during the lectures, so it definitely requires some work on your own as well. After you received your admission to LiU you will receive an email with more information regarding the Swedish course and how to register.

Other options to learn Swedish are SFI , which is a good option especially for non-EU students as it is free while the university course requires you to pay additional tuition fee if you are a fee-paying student. You can also try learning Swedish using apps like Duolingo or Babel, but I only recommend this as a supplement to actually following a course. There are also events called Language Cafe in the university that are fun ways to speak some Swedish in a casual setting.Now how far did I actually get in my first semester of learning Swedish? What can you expect after a few months of learning? Well every time I hear swedes talking, it is a reminder of how hard it is to actually learn a language! But I definitely made some progress, especially in reading and understanding. One good tool for me were swedish shows, like the julkalender, which is a traditional swedish christmas show with a new season every december. With the help of subtitles and Google Translate, it was a fun and surprisingly understandable watch! But it is important to keep in mind that learning a language on level A1 is just a stepping stone to basic understanding and you have to keep learning! My Swedish journey will continue with the A2 course next semester.