How to use this website to improve your Swedish

Are you past the beginner level but are still struggling with native level content? Is it too easy to learn “basic phrases”, but too hard to watch a movie or have a conversation with a Swede? It’s very common for people to get stuck at this level. Why?

This is known as the intermediate plateau. You already know the basic grammatical concepts and enough words to understand any basic text. But in order to be fully functional in the language, you need to learn thousands of words, and you need to train your ear to understand when people speak in the everyday kind of way, which can be quite different from the written language. But how to do this when beginner stuff is too easy and boring and native level stuff is still too challenging?

This is what I’m trying to achieve with this project. In order to progress efficiently, you need comprehensive input. Listening to native level radio and podcasts isn’t bad, but it also doesn’t do much for your learning if you can’t follow what’s being said. In the same way it’s actually not very helpful to read a book if you have to translate more than 20 words per page. It’s simply too slow and difficult to be efficient.

The Simple Swedish Podcast is meant to be a bridge between the beginner level and the advanced level. I speak slower and I avoid using complex grammar and difficult words. I still want it to be as natural as possible though, and that’s why I usually record without any transcript. This way you will still get all the filler words and spoken style sentence structures that you don’t find in texts, but still need to get used to if you want to understand everyday conversations.

Listen to this podcast a bit every day, and you will slowly but surely train your ear to understand natural Swedish, and before you know it you’ll start to understand you colleagues and friends, and you’ll be able to start listening to stuff that are made for native Swedish speakers!

The most efficient way to use the Simple Swedish Podcast is together with the transcript. For the earliest episodes, they are completely free. For all other ones, you’ll get them as a PDF together with exercises and explanations of words and expressions if you support me on Patreon for $5 per month, less than the price of a beer in Sweden! I have put together a guide for how to use the podcast efficiently in you studies here.

I have learned several languages myself, and I’m creating the resource that I would like to have myself when learning a language. I also make videos and articles about useful things related to Swedish and language learning here on the website. And whenever you feel ready to practice speaking real life Swedish, you can check out my iTalki page and book a trial class with me:)

I hope you enjoy this site, and let me know if you have any questions or feedback!