Questions for users of the 8,000+ Most Common Swedish Words courses

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Mina kära vänner!

So…

When sehiralti first put these courses together, he used a certain convention for marking that the adjectives in the course are given in their “common” form (i.e. without an -a ending or a -t ending, just the version you would use with a singular “en” word).

In the first part of the course, he tended to use this convention:

“ren {c}”

Whereas later in the courses, he has just used regular brackets, rather than curly ones.

At any rate, my first question is this:

Did you, or do you, have the same problem as I did for the longest time, i.e. that you did not actually realize what the “C” in curly or regular brackets actually meant???

As a result, I had a phase of randomly removing these bracketed “Cs” because I had no idea what they meant.

My second question also concerns adjectives:

As many of you no doubt already know, the adjective forms change according to whether they are neutral or common, plural or definite. Some adjectives look quite different when they are changed, for example, words like “röd” become “rött” and “blå” and “grå” become “blått” or “blåa”.

In the case of the adjective for “new”, “ny”, I decided to add all three forms - “ny”, “nytt” and “nya” because I thought that might be helpful for beginners to realize that there are all these different forms. There is of course also “nye” as well, used with “den” - “den nye Golf”, for example - but I guess that would be overkill… :slight_smile:

So, here are my main questions:

  1. Shall I add the other adjective forms for other adjectives as I come across them?

  2. Shall I removed the various bracketed “Cs” or not because it is not clear what they mean?

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  1. I had no idea what the c meant and ignored them lol. Didn’t pay much thought.

  2. If you could add the conjugated adjectives, you’d be incredible. But that’s a lot of work. Do it if you feel up to the challenge, but don’t feel obligated.

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Adding conjugated forms of adjectives (for non-irregular adjectives) is/would be absurdly stupid, IMO and completely unnecessary.

The rules are literally add an -a and add a -t, in 90% of cases. Honestly, why bother at all?

I mean sure, add dumma (from dum - additional m) and galna (from galen - an e disapppears) and so on but the rest???

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Thanks for chiming in! Basically, I think you are right and I will use the convention that is used on the Duolingo course if I find the time and remember to do it.

My main reason for NOT bothering to add the conjugations is that adding any extra words - e.g “ny, nytt, nya” instead of just “ny” means that during reviews ALL of these words are offered in the options, including the commas (!!!) - which means that testing for the basic word “ny” becomes virtually worthless as virtually nothing else will appear as a choice.

When I started learning Swedish, I started reading original Swedish straight away - “Män som hatar kvinnor” alongside “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and the German translation of the book - so I believe I became familiar with the fact that “rött” and “röda”, for example, both mean “red” quite early on in my learning.

So, to cut a long story short, I won’t be adding the other versions of the adjectives.

@TheFour-GatedDanzig: hope you understand my reasoning :slight_smile: