Customer Reviews

Colloquial Swedish (Colloquial Series)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I learned Swedish without a single formal lesson extremely quickly (in 4 months to fluency whilst living in a Swedish / English speaking environment), and bought and borrowed an enormous range of books to bring me there. This is the book that I used to learn my first words. For the extremely early stages of learning the language I would recommend this book and tape, but once you get to about lesson 6 or 8 you will move quicker by shifting to a book concentrating on vocabulary and idioms in conjunction with The Essentials of Swedish Grammar. See my review of the Teach Yourself series Swedish book for further advice on which books I recommend as you progress through intermediate and advanced.

The book is a serious textbook (but not dry and boring like in high school), and the Authors are writing it to an audience who actually want to learn Swedish, and are not interested in learning only travel phrases. This book does very nicely, but does ask you to move very quickly to get from one lesson to the next from about lesson 5 or 6. Nevertheless, you will be amazed at how quick your progress is. Each lesson takes less than an hour, so in 6 or eight hours of studying, you will be able to speak basic Swedish with a limited vocabulary using the correct word order in the present, past and future (it is at this stage also that I recommend moving off this book to one that builds vocab and another that presents you all the grammar of the language in a nutshell). You can, after spending a week or two with other books, return to this book to complete the remainder of the lessons, most of which will be very easy, some of which will still be very difficult (I dipped in and out of it but never again worked with it as true programmed learning). This book is of high quality, but needs to be used in conjunction with other books for the quickest possible gains and then should be followed up with more advanced books to continue your Swedish. This book is titled "The Complete Course" but I would like to emphasise the "For Beginners" aspect. Your learning certainly does not begin and end with this book.

This work is an excellent, thorough welcoming into the Swedish language. Having had experience with several "Colloquial" texts, this is by far the best. Not only are the important aspects of daily Swedish language tackled, but real-life situations are taught besides just phrases like "where can I change traveller's cheques?" The person who finishes this course is truly a Swedish speaker, not someone who merely gets along.

As a new student of Swedish, I bought the book and tapes as a suppliment to my course materials. The book is helpful, but not as easy to use the Ake Viberg grammar reference - which facilitates more rapid reference to grammar rules. The Holmes courses emphasis on everyday spoken Swedish is however welcome. I was very dissapointed in the tapes - the British narrator is quite dry and somewhat annoying with his constant "listen to the speakaa" phrases, and I was expecting more drilling on verb usage as opposed to just listening to conversations and reading. The tapes main function I guess seem to be to get the student used to hearing rapidly spoken Swedish.

The material gets across, but it is rather haphazardly organized; you learn how to say "plastic handle" long before learning any object pronouns. There seems to be an effort to translate new vocabulary as it is introduced, but this is not entirely successful; I found myself repeatedly having to look up words in the reading sections that were not included in the vocabulary lists following the readings. Also, the book makes the unwritten assumption that the reader is British, which produces surprisingly many inconveniences for an American reader. All things considered, one can certainly learn beginning Swedish from this book, but not in a particularly efficient or utile manner.

You can buy the Book and tapes, just the book, or just the tapes. Make sure you are getting what you want. I accidently ordered just the tapes. They have a very good pronunciation section, but then skip to conversations at full speed. I was a little overwhelmed, so don't get this as your only course.

I tried to start learning Swedish straight off with this text, and was soon overwhelmed by the sheer mass of vocabulary (often not beginner-level at all, such as "manufacture", "plastic handle", "red-checkered") and the very quick pace with which it explains the grammar. I did however appreciate the variety of the readings, and the realism of the dialogs. You learn what real Swedish sounds and looks like, not textbook or toddler Swedish. Perhaps its for this reason that the vocabulary is so wide in subject and level.

Regardless, I would have much preferred a more gradual set of readings rather than in the second chapter diving into the adventures of a businessman who travels abroad to negotiate with Swedish firms.

The exercises work well, though suffer from being too fragmented. The majority of exercises I've done so far have been only parts of sentences or a few words at a time instead of using them in complete sentences to help cement other parts of what you've learned as well, such as the Teach Yourself Swedish book does.

I would only recommend this book to those people who have studied Swedish for a while and want to expand their vocabulary while reviewing the grammar at the same time. For beginners, I recommend looking at other books, or only using this book if you're working with a tutor who can help you with the parts this book glosses over.

Let me start by saying that I learned a great deal from this book, and I was happy with the variety of topics covered. I also appreciated the accompanying audio tracks which, as others have pointed out, were spoken somewhat rapidly but gave the listener a better idea of what spoken Swedish sounds like. (Given that this is a beginner's course, though, I think it would have been better to slow down the pace a little. You've got to learn to walk before you can run and all that. And for that matter, why was the spoken English so slow? Don't we already speak English?!)

One of my biggest annoyances with this book was that the exercises could be incredibly sloppy. I must have found several errors in the answers in every unit. Sometimes it was a minor problem - for instance, a sentence as given in the unit would feature Character A, but the same sentence given in the answers would feature Character B. The bigger issue was that many of the answers would mix up the very thing they were trying to teach you (an exercise I just did on possessive pronouns gave "hans" as an answer for a noun that was an object; it should have been "sitt"). Another thing that drove me crazy was the incompleteness of some of the explanatory material given before a set of exercises; time and again there were exercises that gave you situations that weren't really covered in the examples previously given, which forced me to look for help outside the book. In several instances, the book asks you to look for examples of certain ways to say phrases x, y, and z in a given dialogue, but some or all of these examples will be completely missing from said dialogue!

And like others, I sometimes found the choice of vocabulary defined bizarre. More obscure terms in the text would be defined ("green-striped," really?) while more important ones were not.

I think this book is a good introduction to numerous grammatical concepts, contains a generally decent range of vocabulary and the content is not too dull. However, the development of those same concepts can be inconsistent, and the exercises are often unacceptably sloppy.

The audio quality is pretty good, and the talking speed is pretty fast for a beginner once you get to around the third chapter; this can be good or bad depending on your previous experience with language learning. It pretty much follows the accompanying book, so for a review of the content, check out the book's reviews.

Great for visual learners of foreign languages...I like the lessons followed by conversations and stories with vocabulary available for immediate learning. I learn better with this than Rosetta Stone (which also is a good product). Den här är mycket bra för några att lära sig Svenska.

This is an excellent source... but only if you're a dedicated book worm. I tend to enjoy classroom style texts when it comes to self-instructed language learning. I'm only a beginner when it comes to Swedish, and this book is a little overwhelming without the instructional CDs/Tapes. I recommend you spend a little more, and get the newest edition, and if you're serious about tackling Swedish, go ahead and get the CDs.