Customer Reviews

Swedish: A Comprehensive Grammar (Routledge Grammars)

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The average Swede doesn't love grammar any more than the average American, and most Swedes are as blissfully unaware of the formal grmmar of their language as most Americans, except when they encounter some telltale dialect irregularity. Swedish is to a degree a reformed language, unlike English, in which spellings have been regularized and grammatical anomalies pruned. Like English, however, Swedish has lost the vast majority of its conjugational and declensional forms, and like English, Swedish is loaded with words of Latin origin. In fact, Swedish is an awful lot like English, which explains the comparative ease with which most Swedes become fluent in English. Skipping over the curious Swedish articles and the "agreement of adjectives", Swedish word order is nearly parallel to English, and Swedes use a plethora of prepositions that seem outrageously idiomatic... until you realize that English has the same bad habit. It might help to imagine Swedish as the "other half" of English; if you put Swedish and French together in a blender, you'd end up with an English smoothie.

The Routledge Swedish Comprhensive Grammar is NOT a textbook for learning to speak Swedish. Believe me, learning to speak and understand spoken Swedish will require hours and months with a native speaker. Still, like other cognate-rich languages, Swedish should be easy enough to read with a modicum of grammar and a full-size dictionary. You DON'T need Swedish to visit Sweden, and you WON'T understand Bergman without subtitles just from a study of comparative grammar, but you'll be able to read Astrid Lindgren in Swedish in a few weeks if you try, and other great Swedish writers will eventually become available.

This summary of Swedish grammar is lucid, orderly, and remarkably complete. There are several kinds of readers who might find it useful: 1) teachers of English or linguists who do love grammar for its own sake; 2) scholars of Old English who want a comparative baseline for understanding the evolution of modern English; 3) people like me, who spent some of a childhood in Sweden but whose command of the language is imperfect.

Having tried at various times to teach Japanese and European colleagues a little more ample English, I can say that we anglophones have reason to be jealous. Would that we had as comprehensive a volume of English grammar as Routledge provides for Swedish!

There are people who like nothing more than to pick up a book on the grammar of a foreign language and read it, to find out what that language is like and how it works, and I have to admit I'm one of them. We are the nerds of the linguistic universe (although technically, I would say the universal generative and mathematical grammar guys outrank us). But a book like this is enough to transport us to that big linguistic Valhalla in the sky.

This is a very detailed, well written, and comprehensive Swedish grammar that should serve the needs of the student and instructor of Swedish and of Germanic languages in general. In addition to the treatment of the grammar, it includes a glossary of linguistic and grammatical terms for those who are a little rusty on the details of their grammar, and who can't recall what a case declension, a subjective complement, or the subjunctive mood is anymore (although that modal construction, as in English, has almost disappeared).

I'd previously read Holmes's Swedish: An Essential Grammar, which is also excellent, but this one is even more detailed and comprehensive. As another reviewer observed, there is a dearth of basic resources for people interested in learning Swedish, and this book fills a major gap in the coverage that should be a boon to the most demanding student of the language.

I would describe it as "skit bra" infact. My need for learning Swedish is based on my living and working here. It's a big book but well worth the effort. Very well written and all the linguistic terms that you may be unfamiliar with are explained in a glossary. I needed a good thorough text on the subject and I think I made a good choice. I would like to see more of the style guidelines/diktats such as those found in "Riktig Svenska" by Wallenberg (I think). That would make it a one stop shop for using Swedish.

With so few Swedish grammar books this is a must have. It covers everything one needs to know at an intermediate to advanced level.

I purchased this book in order to learn Swedish. Although this book contains everything which is grammar-related in Swedish, it is very poorly organized - the index refers not to page numbers, but section numbers. The subject order in the book is not suited for a Swedish learner/student - it would rather be suitable for a teacher as a reference.

If you are looking for a textbook, this is not the proper book. I hoped it would be a comprensive and grammatically intense text book structured like "L'essentiel de la grammaire francaise", where all the main grammar points are covered and well organized: usage of articles, nouns; tenses and moods of verbs; sentence structure, relative pronouns and clauses - all the topics that make up a grammar. This text is strictly a reference guide that often provides examples without exposition or statenment of the general grammatical rules. As a reference text, is is a somewhat poorly organized. Nonetheless, for someone who already knows Swedish, the book could be useful.