[Course Forum] 8,000+ Most Common Swedish Words - part 1

Community-Created Courses Swedish
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If you have any problems with the course or suggestions to make, this is the place to come to!

Looking forward to hearing from you soon!

amanda-norrsken

Link to the course: http://www.memrise.com/course/99412/3000-most-common-swedish-words/

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Do I need to create a new thread to talk about a problem with the course? Or just post it here.

I’m about halfway through and having trouble with “according to” because sometimes “enligt” is accepted and other times “i enlighet med” and I seem to always choose the wrong one. It’s so bad that now I’m getting review sessions where both of them are coming up at the same time.

By the way, I want say that aside from this one issue, the course itself is awesome and has been getting me to the actual point where I can understand most of what I read.

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I have been working on trying to get to grips with this problem (i.e. words that have the same definition, but are different words in Swedish), but I have been doing it as I review myself, so it is kind of haphazard.

I will have a look right now.

Glad you like the course! I think it is awesome, too!

And if you keep on mentioning things like this, it will get even more awesome, so please post again if you find anything similar. The “synonyms” are very tricky to deal with, but I am doing my best to try and find a solution.

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I imagine this is a common problem for any language course that goes beyond the very basics. I figure I’ll eventually understand the differences in usage when I see more of these words in context, but for now I just want to increase my vocabulary sĂ„ fort som möjligt :slight_smile: . For this course, I’ve been paying attention to the specific wording for each synonym. Usually there’s some difference I can spot, even if it’s only a minor one or a helpful “NOT faktisk,” but “according to” had me stumped.

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What I am doing now is to add Swedish phrases like this:

So “according to” when it should be translated by “enligt” goes like this:

according to [ ~ min uppfattning] i.e. enligt min uppfattning

And “i enlighet med” will appear as “according to” with the hint: [i ~ med]

I hope this will help, because, as far as I can see, they do seem to both mean “according to”.

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I have been learning Swedish for two years now and because I speak fluent German (I live in Germany and studied German to degree level, plus I also have a Diploma in Translation), I can read Swedish pretty well now, having used the memrise courses and reading Swedish right from the beginning (“MĂ€n som hatar kvinnor” - because I liked the book and had the German and English translations).

As I get better, I am also starting to see the differences between words, but sometimes it is not even a semantic one, but the grammatical collocations of a word can be different.

“att sluta” and “att avsluta” both have basically the same meaning of “to finish”, but I finally discovered that “att sluta” is nearly always used with verbs, and “att avsluta” with nouns. I have now added this to the definition and I hope it helps.

The addition of things like "NOT “faktisk” is pure desperation on my behalf!

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Thank you for taking care of this so quickly! That will be very helpful.

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These problems drove me nuts when I first started doing this course and I kept complaining about it, so, in the end, sehiralti made me a course contributor :grin:

And I really think that this is the best Swedish course on memrise, having tried a few others.

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Oh, and a really good place to see how a word is used is the “korp” website.

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MĂ€n som hatar kvinnor is definitely on my to-read list but I’ve been starting out with books that are probably a bit easier, like Hungerspelen. But being able to read both the English and Swedish versions of a book is definitely helpful.

I haven’t tried any other Swedish course on Memrise, maybe because I’ve been so happy with this one. Today I had a cool experience where my exposure to prefixes like “före” and “efter” and the words “att trĂ€da” and “en företrĂ€dare” helped me to immediately understand “eftertrĂ€dare” in a news article about the contenders to be the next British PM. So even though I may only be 1,775 words in on the course, I don’t feel that that accurately says just how many words I’ve learned here.

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There is an online version of “MĂ€n som hatar kvinnor” - somebody Russian (or at least all the characters around it are in something that looks like Russian) has put it online. I discovered it by accident. Would you like the link if I can find it?

Anyway, I have found it so here it is:

http://www.litmir.me/br/?b=154774&p=54

When I first started reading it, I would read like a few sentences in Swedish, or a small paragraph, and then read the English to fill in the gaps. I was doing this 3K course at the same time, so by the time I got further along in the course and the book, I was proficient enough that I stopped using the English translation!

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I have access to the ebooks and audio books for the whole trilogy through a Mofibo subscription, but thank you for the offer.

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The Germans have a wonderful word for that kind of experience, they call it an “Erfolgserlebnis” - i.e. " a success experience".

Those experiences are what it’s all about and what keeps us going!

Where do you get a Mofibo subscription? I haven’t heard of them before.

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https://mofibo.com has a subscription service that provides access to a bunch of ebooks and audio books. There’s also https://www.storytel.se who appear to have a bigger library but wouldn’t work for me where I live (though if you live in Germany, you might have more success). I love books so this has been a wonderful find for me.

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Thank you for mentioning the Korp website. I found this: https://spraakbanken.gu.se/korp/ and it looks pretty awesome. I plan to use it to gain a better understanding of many of the words from this course.

I did a search for “i enlighet med” and from the examples given I would say a more specific translation might be “in accordance with” rather than just “according to” (or maybe both?).

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After looking at the list for “i enlighet med” on korp, I did exactly what you suggested and changed the definition to “in accordance with, according to”. And I used the example “i 
 enlighet med lagen” as a prompt.

The website you found is the one I meant, but when I have put in the link before with a word attached, then the link is pages long!

This corpus is a fantastic resource, I agree!

Another cool thing you can do is find compound words, using either a suffix or a prefix.

So if you wanted to find “eftertrĂ€dare” and other words using “efter” as a prefix, you would just type in “efter” and check the box for prefix. Same for “trĂ€dare”. I shall be using this a lot more often, too!

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Thanks for this course. It has been extremely helpful. One question - should ‘krets’ be ‘circuit’ instead of ‘circle’?

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First of all, I would like to say a BIG thank-you for contacting the forum! All contributions to the forum help to improve the course so I am really happy that you made the effort to find this place! If you ever find anything that seems wrong, please come here and let me know.

Secondly, to your question on the word “krets”:

Yes and no!

An electric circuit is “en [ström]krets, strömbana”.

But if we talk about “circles” in the sense of a group of people, then “krets” is used in Swedish, too, “i politiska kretsar”.

http://www.dailyswedish.com/words/krets_1/

I use ord.se to check the words, along with “korp” (a concordance database) - the spraakbanken database - and a whole bunch of other websites, such as babla, dictcc, as well as just using google.se and typign in “krets” and seeing what comes up in both images and general pages.

Most words don’t have just ONE single translation, which I am trying to get across in this course. The dictionaries sehiralti used when he first put this course together weren’t always the best so I am trying to slowly but surely improve the definitions so that the main meanings of the most important words in Swedish are covered comprehensively.

But it is a lot of work, of couse, and I just do it for fun in my free time, which I don’t have so much of right now!

I shall check the translations given for “en krets” right away! Thanks for getting in touch.

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It looks like you have been updating some of the translations. It is greatly appreciated - this course is wonderful. Another pair that could be improved is doktor / lĂ€kare. Both show up as “doctor” which makes going from English to Swedish very difficult. Would it be possible to add the “loan word” / “not a loan word” tags to them?

Thank you again for all your efforts on the course!

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Thanks very much for the positive feedback! It is always nice to hear that the changes I have made are appreciated.

I shall find the “doktor” / “lĂ€kare” words straight away and change them accordingly.

As I pretty much read only Swedish fiction these days, I am coming across a lot of very basic words used in ways I didn’t know about and am adding these as I come across them. One of them was “rĂ€dd”, which I only knew as meaning “afraid”, but I have since discovered it can have a different meaning if used with a different preposition!

When I add these, it makes the entry for the word much longer and a bit more complicated, but I hope this isn’t a problem for most people.

I am also adding a lot more Swedish phrases as it is sometimes easier to distinguish two separate words according to the different phrases the words are used - or not used - in. I personally find this the best way to learn a language - to pick up short phrases as chunks - so I hope the addition of these phrases is appreciated.

All feedback is welcome!

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