Even though there are only about 10 million native Swedish speakers and most of them speak English very well, the Swedish language is a good choice if you’re looking for a new language to learn.
Here are a few good reasons to learn Swedish:
- Sweden is a beautiful holiday destination, with cozy cities and stunning nature.
- Swedish grammar is fairly easy to learn. Verbs, for example, don’t change for each personal pronoun.
- There are a few very good Swedish movies and series that you will appreciate even more if you can enjoy and understand them in the original version.
- If you learn Swedish, you will probably learn to understand Danish and Norwegian as well, since they are quite similar, especially when written.

Here are a few tips to get started with learning Swedish:
- Swedish Lessons from Erik Edler on YouTube. Watch the first three or four lessons to get a good start and combine it with other ways to practice, like using an app like Duolingo. After you’ve had some more practice you can come back once every few weeks for a following lesson. At this moment there are 11 lessons in total. Erik explains everything very clearly in English and all words and phrases also appear written in the videos.
- Follow the fun and entertaining Instagram account Fun Swedish from Elans Language school. Besides providing you with new vocabulary nearly every day, there’s also a fun and interesting anecdote below every post.
- Watch Swedish movies and series on Netflix. Here’s a list of movies and series in Swedish that I have been enjoying recently. Watching movies in your target language is a super easy way to get exposed to new vocabulary, to hear the right pronunciation and learn something about the Swedish culture at the same time.
- When you’ve gotten a bit acquainted with hearing Swedish you can try and listen to the slowly spoken news in Swedish. Even though in the beginning it will be hard to really understand everything, it’s a fun challenge to note down the words or phrases that you do understand and see how your list gets bigger each episode. After a while you might even be able to write a short synopsis of the main news items in your own language.