News in simple Swedish

Content Forum
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I found this part of Radio Sweden yesterday: Sveriges Radio P4 Klartext. They provide short written summaries of a 10 minute news program daily.
http://www.sr.se/cgi-bin/p4/klartext/index.asp?nyheter=1&ProgramID=493

Steve, I just read your comment on Anapaula’s beginner’s problems with French. As a native Portuguese speaker she probably has similar advantages that I have as a German speaker with Swedish (with advanced knowledge of English at that). But I can understand the difficulties one has in the beginning phase. It takes some getting used to the rhythm and hearing ‘words’, so I listen to the same content over and over, and that’s more interesting if the content is a bit challenging.

I started Swedish in January at Lingq from scratch, just to give it a try. I work with online dictionaries but for the main part now I use an inexpensive e-dictionary named Word Explorer 2.0 (Swedish-German, jourist verlag) on my PC. After working my way through ‘The power of the linguist’ I started importing a few articles from Dagens Nyheter (dn.se) and found that I could deal with the texts, although some compound words are hard to analyze. I also use your interviews with Richard, the Storebror series as well as the Biskop interviews and the ‘Sverige’ text. The more I listen to the interviews that are not supported by a written transcript the more I understand. I’ve become quite good at guessing meanings, although ‘false friends’ are quite frequent and many words seem quite strange, i.e. I cannot relate them directly to either German or English words.

The somewhat limited content on Lingq is no big problem for the time being. When I first listened to Swedish Internet radio I was quite astonished by how much I understood, it was so similar to the authentic interviews. There may be accents in Swedish that are more difficult to understand, or people might speak very quickly and maybe not so clearly, but I feel I can continue like that. I’m quite happy just listening and understanding and I think I’ll soon start working on literary texts and more newspaper articles.

As for speaking events, I’m looking forward to trying this out once I have more free time available in about two weeks.

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Alleray,

thanks for the lengthy comment. I am glad that you were able to move to authentic content so early. Obviously it is easier in languages as similar, at least in terms of common vocabulary, as Swedish and German. It sort of confirms my view that vocabulary is much more important than vocabulary. If you have the words, you can figure out the meaning and even identify patterns with enough exposure to them. The complicated explanations that would be necessary, especially for languages like German or Russian, can be postponed until a later date, when there is a greater likelihood that they will make sense.

Thanks for the info re Swedish content. I will follow up and see if we can use it and under what conditions.

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Hi Steve, what do you mean with:
“vocabulary is much more important than vocabulary”

Regarding my language learning I see often that I can understand the meaning but often a little expression is important for positive or negative (or similar) and exactly that I’m not able to identify.