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Tones

In Swedish, there is something called tones or accents, meaning a word can be pronounced the same way, but sound differently because of the change in your voice pitch. It becomes a little more like singing rather than just plain speaking. These tones, unlike Chinese or Vietnamese tones (also tonal languages), are mainly used for "decorating" the language, that is, they don't change the meaning of a word (only in some rare cases). So all of you who are not so much into tones won't have to worry, 'cuz you'll do perfectly fine without them. smile

The tone thingy is nothing that Swedish kids get taught in school, so many Swedes are unknowing about this feature. They might know that Swedish sounds more sing-song-y than it's neighbour language German, but probably not why.

Swedish has two different tones/accents; acute and grave accent. Or accent 1 and accent 2, whatever.

Acute Accent
This is accent is just normal stress, you know, when one part of a word is said stronger than the others. Most Indo-European languages has this, so it's nothing unique to Swedish.

This accent will be marked with a ´, for example: nejden {néiden}.

Grave Accent
This one, however, might be a little trickier. You might think of it as some kind of... I don't know really... xp It's said like down-up; you go down on the first syllable and up on the following. Listen to these:

anka {àŋka} - duck

husmus {hÙsmUs} - mouse that lives in your house

olja {òlja} - oil

Did you notice the way it went; down-up? Compare acute accent to grave accent with words that are written the same, but pronounced differently:

anden {ánden} - the duck (you know, the one with the green head)
anden {ànden} - the spirit
anden, anden {ánden, ànden}

These are two of the few words where tones actually makes any difference. Don't you worry if you don't get the difference right now. You'll get used to hearing it as we go along and after few lessons you'll pick it up excellently.



Exercise A

So, I made I little excercise that you can do, if you want to. It covers all the lessons so far, so you can check if you've got it all right. I really don't know how to explain this in English, but something along the lines of "Figure out which ones of the words (A-H) that go with each audio file (1-8)". Does that make sense? Hopefully you'll understand when you see it.

A - aska
B - ila
C - anden (1)
D - yla
E - van
F - vann
G - illa
H - anden (2)

1, 2, 3,
4, 5, 6, 7, 8



Correct answers:
A = 5
B = 7
C = 6
D = 1
E = 4
F = 8
G = 3
H = 2


Excercise B

This excercise is of the same kind as the one above. Try to figure out which words go with which word with { and }, so you know if you understand my phonetical spelling or whatever it's called. ^^

A - älva
B - spindel
C - nejd
D - lugn
E - sång
F - elva
G - jul

1 - [soŊ]
2 - [jUl]
3 - [spìndel]
4 - [èlva]
5 - [neid]
6 - [lUŋn]
7 - [ầlva]

I've always wanted to learn swedish surprised

Sadly, yet, the only things I know are ' jag älskar dig ' , ' jag är fransyska ' 'vad som hellst' [ useful cool ] and ' jag pratar lite svenska'
Yay -__-

I love the way it's pronounced XD It's sort of funky

:'D Sure !
But erm I bet I'd be 10 000 times worse than your teachers XD

Koko.Dk, Gothenburgish is the same as Swedish, it just sounds a little different. I think you have to live in Gothenburg to actually get the hang of it. But if you ever come here, I'm sure they'd be glad to teach you. ^^

So... I think what we have so far is a pretty good start, so I'm gonna start with the actual lessons now. You guys are still following this, right? 'Cuz I don't want to teach if no one's learning, I would only feel stupid. xp

First lesson will probably be up tonight (tonight for me, so I guess that'd be around 4 pm to 1pm for most of you guys).

I am trying to learn Swedish but some of your links have expired. I was wondering, will knowing Afrikaans (similar to Dutch) make Swedish easier for me?

Couldn't do exercise A because the sound files were not found...

Exercise B answers:

A = 7
B = 3
C = 5
D = 6
E = 1
F = 4
G = 2

Right?

And also:



Mallard duck? http://homepage.mac.com/wildlifeweb/bird/mallard/mallard_male_10tfk.jpg